JHK’s Three-Act Play, Big Slide
A log mansion in the Adirondack Mountains…
A big family on the run…
A nation in peril…
Visit the Big Slide Page to order, perform, or see sample scenes.

Ho ho ho! It’s that time of year again. Here’s JHK’s holiday classic: A Christmas Orphan.

11-year-old Jeff Greenaway hears his mom and dad argue one night after an office Christmas party. He infers from their garbled squabble that he is an orphan, found in a willow basket on the welcome mat outside their New York apartment. Thinking now that his parents are imposters, he steals away to Grand Central Station and buys a train ticket to Drakesville, Vermont, where he intends to start life all over again.Print | Kindle | Kobo (Digital) | Barnes & Noble (Digital)

The Sunday night news, scant as it is these days despite the grotesque exertions of over a thousand cable TV stations, showed the old familiar faces lit up with crocodile smiles. The Republic was saved, surprise, surprise, by a last-minute fugue of reasonableness, when all concerned decided that putting the business-end of a double-barreled 20-guage shotgun in America’s pie-hole might not summon the spirits of Ronald Reagan, Santa Claus, Adam Smith, Chuck Norris, and the Holy Ghost after all.

Let’s give thanks that it’s over because now the USA can get on with its systemic collapse honestly and fairly. Even though the debt ceiling extravaganza ended in something like political failure, one point did seem to shine through: there’s no more money. Anyway, no money for non-bankers, and pretty soon even the bankers will be out of money too, because their money is fantasy banking money (sssshhhh, don’t tell them) consisting of hard-drives packed with digital slime trails of swindles and frauds. The public can live in straight-up unvarnished fear now that they are liable to lose everything they thought they had.

This new depression is way different from the hazily remembered one of grampy’s boyhood. There was no money then, too, in 1934, but you didn’t have to puzzle out the metaphysical workings of a collateralized debt obligation to know what the score was. Your pockets were just empty and the bank down the street was shuttered. The country had plenty of everything except money: lots of oil, good farmland, manpower, ores, timber, beeves-on-the-hoof, excellent railroads, dynamic cities, and factories just recently built (only the orders for goods stopped coming in). Yet something happened that still mystifies the viziers who call themselves economists.

Was it all that mischief on Wall Street with the “bucket shops” and the margin-gone-wild, and the shoeshine boys proffering stock tips to their customers? Or was it some remorseless cyclical exhalation of history? Or was it that plus the Keynesian monkey-business with interest rates and the issuance of currency? Or was it some fundamental flaw in the workings of industrial capitalism itself? These questions have never been adequately answered, though there is no shortage of “stories” cooked up to explain it – many of them elegantly entertaining.

My own guess is that the industrial experience itself was a peculiar experiment rife with treacherous self-amplifying feedbacks that the participants were not prepared for, such as the rapid saturation of markets via mass production at the colossal scale. Whoops. And meanwhile, everybody in China is living in the equivalent of the 12th century, so forget about selling them radios. (Globalization eventually fixed that…or did it?) To put a finer point on it, industrialism (and all its digital offshoots) may not be a permanent feature of the human condition, but an anomalous congruence of some historical events that had a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I happen to think we’re at the end of this anomalous era because we’ve run through the material resource base. I know a lot of people eagerly await the nano-dawn of self-replicating bot Satori, where everything we need is literally conjured out of thin air. The Viziers would really love that because, at last, their models would work! Personally, I do not hold my breath waiting for Kurzweilian “Singularity.” We’ll be disappointed enough when Walmart fails to run on wind turbines.

So now we enter an economic terra incognita of the real post-industrial economy – not the Cinderella hoo-hah of digi-magic advertised in places like Wired Magazine, but more like a Foxfire world made by hand. We’re out of cheap oil, cheap and good ores, ocean fish, good timber, and lots of other things. All the stuff we erected to live our lives in – the stupendous armature of highways, strip malls, suburban houses, skyscraper condos, sewer systems, electric grids – is beyond our power to repair now. We can only patch it, and that can only work for so long before things go dark. (Can you sharpen a saw blade?)

The money part is not so hard to understand. When the dynamism wanes in a hypertrophic system, money can no longer be created. Real money, that is. Money that means something, a trustworthy medium of exchange, in a system where borrowers reliably pay back loaned money. All the current money fiascos underway around the world, old and new, western and eastern, are just dumb-shows put on to conceal the fact that money is not being paid back. Real wealth is contracting – even as the smaller pool of remaining wealth moves magnetically to the centers of power.

We will never solve this American debt crisis. We’re going broke fast and it will be like falling down a long staircase. The federal government will never recover. It will pretend to be in charge of things that continue to fall apart, and eventually its pretenses will be seen for what they are – and then it will be every community for itself. (The same can be said of the states, and even the counties.)

The troubles will mount more rapidly, too, from here, because nobody has been fooled by the machinations in congress the past month, except maybe the elected cravens at the center of it all, and many of them are in their final years of lofty, well-feathered splendor. A debt rating warning – if that’s what it turns out to be – will be brushed aside, and for some good reasons, too, but it is really a dark sign that our Republic does not function anymore and is primed to break apart.

About James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology and the Fate of the Nation. His novels include World Made By Hand, The Witch of Hebron, Maggie Darling — A Modern Romance, The Halloween Ball, an Embarrassment of Riches, and many others. He has published three novellas with Water Street Press: Manhattan Gothic, A Christmas Orphan, and The Flight of Mehetabel.

Well, James, waddya know. They made a compromise of debt limit. Just in time to save the banksters from another global financial meltdown, and fuck the rest of us, continuing to maintain their DOMINATION over the slavish masses. Trust went out the door millennia ago; and all we have left is their merciless control over the planet. Some more Spectacle from DC – the Deficit Deal – to keep the huddled masses scared and confused, and beholden to their masters.kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/predators-and-princes-from-kinship-to-kingship/
Enjoy this week’s missive. kulturCritic

There’s always a temptation to try to find a parallel in history, and the pitfalls that go with that. The Weimar one is very apt, however, following the weak leadership we have lately from all involved parties.
Visit the Leibowitz Society at leibowitzsociety.blogspot.com/2011/07/ghost-town-blues.html for a discussion about our ongoing collapse as well as what the future holds and discussions about how to save our knowledge for the future.

Global GDP approx $60 trillion
(by comparison USA public debt approx $15 trillion)
Revenue from oil sales 86 Mbd x 365 x $100 = $3 trillion.
The whole of the world’s GDP is being leveraged by a 20:1 ratio on the back of oil production.
Oil production in terminal decline – what does that say for the world GDP – also reached its limit of growth.
USA and the west will be saddled with debts that their declining GDPs will never be able to service
Have a nice week
2020

I remeber being asked in 2000 before one of my grad school history classes if there were to be a course on globalism, what would the curriculum be and how would one teach it? I think the professor was a bit ahead of her time when she asked that, for the history had not been made yet to demonstrate how globalism was the complete global-phuck of systems, society and civilization. It would be akin to asking an ancient roman how one would study Empire in all its parts while gazing accross the Rubicon assured no one would ever “cross it”
As for the teahadists, has anyone ever really considered that that band of “rogues” is really backed by those remaining entities holding “all the chips” of our degrading monetary system so that while they “drown the government in a bathtub” they can easily step in and become what they intended to destroy? One can go back and forth in time as to exactly when our democracy ended and started to become a facist dominion, but one thing is very clear and that is that a new paradigm is on the brink of taking over….and as things fall apart, nobody is paying much attention. Peak resources aside, the ghost in the machine is bent on self-destruct because demoicracy, freedom, oil, food….nothing lasts forever, despite man’s endeavor to make it so otherwise.
This wee budget malestrom is merely a preview, a small bump on the road to what our destination is likely to be. How soon now before things really dissolve and the world we once thought we knew is no longer even being played out in pretend?

One of your best ever, which is really saying something. And the comments so far are pretty good too, an anomaly on the web that shows the nature of this site and its readers.
Time to get on with the work of revisioning, respiriting, rebuilding and reorganizing the post-industrial world. Starting from well outside the “mainstream,” taking support, resources and hope where we can find them, and doing what we have to do. Thanks for leading the process.

Recently it’s been reported that Federal Spending, as a percentage of GDP has, since 2008, gone up rather dramatically. And while it’s true that Federal Spending has gone up, the prevailing assumption is that the GDP has been growing as well, even if a bit slower than we’re accustomed to. In reality the GDP, when adjusted for ACTUAL inflation instead of the CPI fiction, has been shrinking and has been to varying rates since the 1973 oil embargo!gwabert.com/

I have enjoyed these Monday morning rants but I feel they may have reached the point where they have outlived their usefulness, other than the entertainment value just as comedians are entertaining. I think everyone gets it now. We are on the road to ruin. But when we reach ruin, what will we do?

James writes, “pretty soon even the bankers will be out of money too, because their money is fantasy banking money (sssshhhh, don’t tell them) consisting of hard-drives packed with digital slime trails of swindles and frauds.”
I met a NY city police chief whilst on vacation last summer, we chatted.
I still regret not asking him why his officers were concerned with Escalades double parked outside the kindergarten and had not looked into the biggest crime in history.

“My own guess is that the industrial experience itself was a peculiar experiment rife with treacherous self-amplifying feedbacks that the participants were not prepared for, such as the rapid saturation of markets via mass production at the colossal scale. Whoops. And meanwhile, everybody in China is living in the equivalent of the 12th century, so forget about selling them radios. (Globalization eventually fixed that…or did it?) To put a finer point on it, industrialism (and all its digital offshoots) may not be a permanent feature of the human condition, but an anomalous congruence of some historical events that had a beginning, a middle, and an end.” -JHK
That would be my guess also; and, as always, handily expressed! :o)
A Mr. Fish cartoon had a fine, chilling caption for the top-hat-and-monocle crowd:
“And then, without warning, doomsday refused to take a bribe…”
Thanks once AGAIN, JHK!

Several weeks ago, I met an Indian gentleman from Mumbai on the train from Guangzhou to Hong Kong. He said that he exports stainless steel from China to India. During our conversation, I mentioned “Peak Oil”. He seemed like a rational man, so I was struck by his deep-seated, irrational belief in technology, and that technology would inevitably save us with some new, cheap, unlimited replacement for oil.
Man’s belief in technology is akin to a religious faith.

Globalism in it’s third stage
JHK, I have been mystified why Keynes is always being blamed for the supply-side regressive economic system we’ve been living under since Reaganomics was instituted. I mentioned the same to Charles Hugh Smith a few weeks ago. We still have vestiges of Keynesianism but it can’t work with the present system and ideology that runs our upper echelon now.
The interest rates were played with by Reagan, as they were very high in the double digits during Carter’s term. So Greenspan lowered them artificially to start the housing bubble way back when.
The idea here was that the US was the greatest market place with planned obsolescence built in for continual growth, but that wasn’t enough when huge potential markets like China and India were out there.
The idea was to turn our economy into a post-industrial one where our transnationals could pollute at will with slave labor and no restrictions. (Neoliberalism) And we would be a service economy. Banking being the largest most affluent global player.
Our infrastructure would be sold to foreign interests to build. That’s where we are now, with our social contracts about to collapse and a president that comes in right of the Republicans.
We are in for a great fall, but it didn’t have to play out like this, even if we are in peak oil. Peak finance didn’t have to come into play for the last 35 years, distorting everything into twisted metal. Just visualize the World Trade Center for how we look now.

How much made up money is out there?
In print on paper?
In Binary Code on the Computer Machines?
Trillions? Quadrillions?
Installing Solar in extremely remote farm locations is the best medication for this ailing brain of mine that is so quickly losing faith in the future…
Cheers JHK and the rest of you ClusterFuckers.
PUSH ON. DO GOOD. KEEP SMILING.

BTW, I found this really incisive:
” Let’s give thanks that it’s over because now the USA can get on with its systemic collapse honestly and fairly. Even though the debt ceiling extravaganza ended in something like political failure, one point did seem to shine through: there’s no more money. Anyway, no money for non-bankers, and pretty soon even the bankers will be out of money too, because their money is fantasy banking money (sssshhhh, don’t tell them) consisting of hard-drives packed with digital slime trails of swindles and frauds. The public can live in straight-up unvarnished fear now that they are liable to lose everything they thought they had.” -JHK
Alrighty then! Some of the pretending has indeed vanished into the straw-grasping circle of the Venn diagram; the extending will be extended until it becomes totally irrelevant dream-smoke. (That will be in the midst of privation so profound, that those who would indulge in the extending will have to be expunged for the commonweal ;o)

It’s the morning after the night before down in Foggy Bottom. The party-goers have hit the snooze button on the alarm clock and it’s quiet again. For a while. So we have a few more minutes to wish on a star that a miracle will occur.

Real wealth is created by digging raw materials out of the ground, processing them to make useful commodities and adding value by manufacturing goods from them.
It takes decades of blood, sweat and tears to lift a nation from an economy based on agriculture to one based on industrialisation.
China only achieved their current status in 30 years because they are burning up the most concentrated source of energy produced on this planet, and they have over 1300 million willing volunteers.
Whilst they were busy with their own industrial revolution – we were destroying our manufacturing base and pretending that we could run an economy based on servicing public and private debt.
Meanwhile, we took our eye off the ball, and let our infrastructure slip into terminal decline.
As JHK points out, this is no longer like the 1930’s when we had vast resource wealth in petroleum and raw materials and an agri-economy which could feed the nation.
Now the nation’s industry is turning to iron oxide along with much of the crumbling infrastructure built in the post war booms years – and there’s nothing left in the coffers to repair it.
Makes the Weimar option look an attractive way out of this mess. And all those oversized Escalades, and F350 pickups will come in handy to cart around all those dollars needed to buy your Big Macs and your Cheeze Doodles.

California State Fair included a Muslim outreach booth, from which emanated rumors of a coming billboard campaign extolling Islam. Speaking of coming rumors, there are reports that particle physics scientists are investigating evidence of a singularity, which they have determined occurred in the confines of the shroud of Turin. That could confuse the basic writings of the Qu’ran indeed, even if adherents were not already tying the overworked Prophet (bless his name) to the most questionable Gospel of Barnabas, written about 1300 years too late…
But to the real business of railroads and banking, as Jesse J. would put the matter. As noted by our present day James K. above, railroads certainly were around, across and up & down America in 1934. It seems we’re are in a cosmic confluence of religious and technical happenings and it’s a wonder America still has a remnant of Parallel Bar Therapy at all. Bible reference to railway in Daniel 4 V 15 may be a stretch, but it does say bands of iron and bronze: as in electric railways with Phosphor Bronze? Is America the great tree over the earth, brought to near ruin except for the iron bands that remain? Are Biblical writings to be taken seriously in this age of private enterprise space travel?
Railways seem utterly irrelevant, an anomaly in America with 100 million cars and trucks doing the moving, running on plenteous liquid motor fuel. Or is that the illusion? More, let’s say when David’s cup runneth over in the presence of his enemies in the famous 23rd, we are really talking about Israeli reserves? Large. And will the giants against of Israel have the discipline to refrain from attacking , forgetting about the smooth stones?
America pulls back from the overseas outposts, bringing to bear military units to be renamed Railroad Operating & Maintenance Battalions. Like we had from the Civil War through the VietNam era. Not a new use of the American military, to aid and abet private enterprise railroading. This interesting time at hand, military rail logistics units help with the rebuild of abandoned rail lines to serve agricultural traffic corridors, and propel modest manufacturing renaissance. Crazy idea that, or is Peak Oil the crazy idea, and we continue to motor on happily?

“And, yes, I can sharpen a saw blade.”
Me too; got plenty of [quality] files? Not something to “cheap out” on. Working on my collection, and also have an antique tooth “setting” device that needs some divining. I gots a couple modern piece-o-shit saws to practice on.
“Beeves” is a somewhat anachronistic term for a collection of cows [and bulls] that was quite common in cowboy days. (I always enjoy JHK’s usage of terms and idioms to tickle the curiosity and imagination.)

I believe that things can be turned around but not with this kind of government. To make necessary changes there can be no divided authority. Unfortunately democracy will not work and we are doomed.
Napoleon was able to make necessary changes to French legislation within few days. With current system it cannot be done in 100 years.

Jim, your reference to saturated markets in the 1920s was spot on. Market saturation played a huge but ignored role in the Great Depression.
Nor was the saturation completely unexpected. Sane observers warned of it and predicted an economic contraction as a consequence, but they were poo-pooed as Chicken Littles by the hackneyed consensus thinkers of their day. Never mind that data indicating rising market saturation supported their claims.
The same fucking thing has been happening for the past decade or so. In the Roaring Twenties the market saturation was of automobiles, washing machines and radios; in the aughts it was of advanced consumer electronics. In each case the consensus morons couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t want to keep buying stuff without prompting when they’ve already acquired more luxuries than they can readily make use of or store at home.
What we really need isn’t a way to jump-start an already overheated consumer economy that doesn’t want to be goosed. What we need instead is a social or political consensus of some kind that economic vagaries will not be allowed to result in needless dislocations, e.g. residents being evicted from houses that no one else is interested in occupying. We need a consensus that when a scam backfires, as our real estate scam has recently done, shysters can’t keep playing it on victims who have suddenly become financially impoverished and desperate.

As a canuck i was down in Iowa last weekend. The quad cities have plenty of still functioning 19th
century infrastructure but the city centres?
couldn’t even find a coffee shop open in downtown Davenport, almost devoid of human activity.
Driving back past the corn for fuel refineries,the interstate public works program was choking traffic and then the final commentary on the American Empire.Beggars lining the streets that take traffic out of Detroit and out onto the bridge from the USA

“A debt rating warning … will be brushed aside, and for some good reasons” – JHK.
That’s intriguing. And mystifying. I’d like to hear what those good reasons might be. Is it because Ben Bernanke can and will print as much money as needed to keep the debt pyramid scheme going ?

JHK’s correct: it’s going down slowly, and the public just cannot admit it.
Going to work today was most instructive in why. I got ready to leave, after doing a little more on a barter- carpentry job with some neighbors. They cannot sharpen a saw and don’t really know what one is.
As I finished up and got on my bike, their fat neighbor, in such poor health all around that she often parks on the grass right by the door, roared off in her SUV. She was smoking a cigarette and on the phone.
My bike ride to work revealed more details of why we are so screwed. The slapdash job to “fix” the roads here with stimulus money is already falling apart; the local government used a cheapo “cold seal” process that lasts, tops, 5 years. Potholes are coming back with a vengeance.
As I rode along, stroller mommies were out, some on the phone or texting, while walking the dog AND pushing around junior. It’s the most bizarre thing since those “one-man band” acts that used to be on TV variety shows. Some mommies have twins and TWO dogs tethered to them. I am surprised they don’t have two phones going, too.
They and their paper-pusher (well, button-pusher) hubbies have no useful skills except breeding. Meanwhile, the post-rush-hour contractors were out with their vans and pickups. The black guys have Obama stickers on their vehicles; the white guys have Tea Party stickers.
They do know how to fix things, but I’d bet that not many of them will be able to do diddly on a job site once the current stops running to their DeWalt and Makita power tools.
The only good thing about the debt debate was that it focused all these people away from their self-contained world of Facebook, texting, and a hive of friends. They multitask while the world wheezes and falls apart, all to see a stupid pet video or find out a friend’s status updates.
All in all, my ride was like watching a long fuse burn down to the keg of gunpowder. Glad I can sharpen a saw…for what that is worth when the shelves at Kroger’s and Home Depot get empty.

Well, James, waddya know. They made a compromise of debt limit.
———-
No, there has been no compromise. There is no deal. The party leaders suggested a tentative plan. That is not a deal.
Default happens tomorrow morning, unless legislation is written today and both houses of congress pass it and the president signs it.
That is not going to happen.
Default is on schedule for tomorrow, Aug. 2.

I am glad that you mentioned indusrty. I think it is very important (or maybe not?) that people understand the diffreance between industry and technology. Industry being for the profiting off technologys (or inovations) creations.
Thanks
Travis
Just in case any one dosn’t know;en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technologyen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry

Without bringing manufacturing back and drastically changing the way people move and grow food in here is not possible to solve these problems.
Globalization was the most wasteful and stupid project ever conjured.

I know this is going to sound really far our, but I believe Television is to blame for this whole mess. Bear with me on this.
People imitate what they see on tv. Archie Bunker was the start of mean tv and it continued right through to married with children toEverybody loves Raymond, who no one loved.Shows about nasty families.
Now we have Reality Tv shows where the producers promote nasty mean people to boost ratings as they sell their pride and diginaty for money and prizes.
Isn’t that we have done as Americans we sold out for the trash and trinkets we have seen on TV, mortgaged our future for houses and cars that us baby boomers rejected back in the day as phony status symbols.
It’s like pissing in the wind because TV is only getting more intrusive, Video phone technolgy has been around for a couple of decades but it only started to be accepted by the masses because we see people on TV using it with their Iphones.
TV calls the tune and we dance all night long.

What do you expect when the Financial sector has become nothing but Ponzi schemes and Three-Card Monti distractions.
In Reality, The Powers know that the Ponzi’s have run out of new Rubes & cash flows, and the Monti distractions can’t go on too much longer.
I think that they are just trying to keep things going BAU for as long as they can because they really have no idea how to fix it, at least without the Wealthy having to make a little sacrifice of some kind, which they refuse to do.
So at some point the whole Financial sector is going to collapse. Then, well, can you say Dictatorship? I thought you could, now just keep repeating it so you get used to the word.
Now, that make you feel all better?
Dee Jones

No use crying over spilled hydro-carbons. There was never much chance for man’s lack of integrity and immaturity to be tempered by mathemetically based realities.
First you have to go round and fuck up unitl nine-billion deep – rinse out the garbage and hope the second cycle has enough men with scruples and ingenutiy to make life on Earth work.
Clearly if history is written and mankind endures another century these times will be known as the “too big too succeed” era.

Ohcomeoneverythingsgoingtobefine…
Here’s a thought-experiment: we vigorously encourage Rick Perry and his ilk to pursue their petulant fantasy-rebellion and let the South re-secede, maybe even giving them a good kick in the ass on their way out the door. We thereby jettison the majority of the Jeebus-besotted, knuckle-dragging Republicans who make any sort of intelligent governance impossible.
The remaining three dozen or so states of the new Enlightened States of America are thus liberated actually to address the issues that bedevil us in some coherent way.
Perhaps all the overweening factors that spell the end of Life As We Knew It would nevertheless defy our attempts to intelligently adapt, but at least we would have the satisfaction of knowing we tried, without carrying the albatross of the Tribunes of the Idiocracy, blocking our every attempt to move forward while bellowing through their tabacky-lined precancerous maws about libruls shoving job-killing tax increases down the throats of the Job Creators.

James Kunstler wrote: “All the stuff we erected to live our lives in – the stupendous armature of highways, strip malls, suburban houses, skyscraper condos, sewer systems, electric grids – is beyond our power to repair now. We can only patch it, and that can only work for so long before things go dark.”
I live in an inner-ring suburb built in the 1920s, outside of a once-busy industrial city in the Rust Belt. We lost electricity for about three days last week when the temps were in the high 90s and low 100s (the “misery index” was even higher due to high humidity).
Man, it wasn’t pretty.
Also, wires keep catching fire in the city. The general consensus is that for decades the local grid has been patched with spit ‘n shoeshine, (in this latest incident, they had to bring in cannibalized parts from another part of the state) and there’s a demand for the utility to replace transformers and lines, not just do a quick fix.
I don’t see it happening. We’re stuck with what we have. A friend in Costa Rica, when he heard about it, said it sounded like Central America.

Man’s belief in technology is akin to a religious faith.
———————————–
Taken to the extreme….yes. But, the simple truth is, so far we have been able to adapt, and if we can somehow keep from killing ourselves off for one stupid idea or another, “we” as a species, might actually make it. I suspect there might be one “die off” or two along the way, to give us time to evolve, but that’s just speculation.
What is indisputable however, is that man’s belief in armageddon IS a religious faith, or to be more precise, stems from religious faith. When will people wake up to that?

the debt problem will solve itself….all the bs RMBS’s will resolve themselves…all the bs games will resolve themselves eventually. we wont have to do anything….all the crap will find its rightful level….!
we have plenty of resources. we are just spending all our time and money on derivatives instead of modern power development.
we wont survive this because the underlying integrity of the working person has been blown away…..

Meanwhile, the post-rush-hour contractors were out with their vans and pickups.
——————————-
I donno where you live Joe, but around here most of the pickup trucks are parked in the contractors driveway.

It seems there is not even the political will to “patch” the infrastructure. Where is the jobs program in the face of ongoing 9.2% unemployment, and when including the under and non reporting unemployed probably closer to 20%.

The remaining three dozen or so states of the new Enlightened States of America are thus liberated actually to address the issues that bedevil us in some coherent way.
———————————–
I’m still regretting that we won the revolution.

We haven’t been here since the days before the Civil War, but here we are.
The Republican Right is a scary collection of malcontents, fascists and Nazi like players with grievances and hurts that stretch back to the beginning of this republic (although few of them can articulate a coherent description of their perceived wrongs). They will regain power in 2012 and as the saying goes. LETS GET READY TO RUMBLE!
To face this collection of idiots we have the Democrats. What a sad, pathetic group of folks-elected leaders and those who vote for them (me included). This group does not have the courage of their convictions (doesn’t include me). The Republicans are strong only because the Democrats are weak.
I agree with Jim’s analysis. I’ll put dates on it. We’ll stumble into the 2012 election cycle with the nation collapsing into Depression. The Republicans will nominate and win a close race with some bland character. It will be the 2000 election all over again.
But the bland character will turn out to be another Bush. To make up for failures at home, the rabid Right will strike out against “enemies” abroad, trying to act like it still is a super power.
But unlike 2000, the world is different. Unlike Democrats, the rest of the world is no longer going to sit by while we treat them like shit. As we crumble internally, old and new foreign powers are going to push back at the American Clusterfuck. Look for a group we can’t imagine today: China & Russia, Russia & Europe, China, Russia & Europe. Nuclear strike, but different than you think. Take out the Saudi oil fields or Mexico’s oil and the US of A is flat on its ass.
The path we’re on almost guarantees a bad result.

You know,the more I think about it, there really isn’t much choice in the outcome of whats happening now: Either the US will become a dictatorship, or it will be allowed to fall apart into North, South, East & West. Either way, all debts to ‘Dem Ferners’ will be forgotten, and our troops will probably be brought back to clamp down at home.
PRD, the main difference between the US and Costa Rica is that the utility here (ICE) is a monopoly, and they HAVE to fix the power lines.
I recall back when Piggy (PG&E)in Cal was deregulated, and in the quest to increase corp profits, and also exec bonuses, little things like trimming tree limbs near power lines was kinda slacked off on, or contracted out to private companies who didn’t to it at all, just pocketed the fees.
The result was several huge wildfires.
This is the way the whole country is heading.
Nice to be in an already 3-W country. A Democracy too.
Dee

“They do know how to fix things, but I’d bet that not many of them will be able to do diddly on a job site once the current stops running to their DeWalt and Makita power tools. ”
I had a thought a while ago that a major cause of the housing/financial bubble disaster was the PNEUMATIC NAIL GUN, which allowed for the rapid overproduction of ticky-tacky houses, which, in turn needed to be sold to some kind of market (Dubya’s “Ownership Society”), which was itself manufactured by the mortgage “industry,” which is where the no-skill huckster’s went. Wither now is the question?

Not so far out, teddyboy. In 1977, a man named Jerry Mander (love that name) wrote a book entitled “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”. He was right. When I was a kid people didn’t have TVs so we’d hang out on our porches and visit back and forth with the neighbours in the evenings. Then one neighbour got a TV and we’d all go over there and watch it when a good program was on. Then pretty much every household got a TV so people stayed in their own livingrooms and watched it, no more neighbourly visiting in the evenings, but at least the family would hang out together. Now TV watching, on whatever kind of device it is watched on, has become an individual activity, everybody has their own screen. I think we’d live in a different world today if we hadn’t had television and its in-your-face advertising of products we don’t need. I don’t have a TV but when I do see one, the worst ads seem to be the ones for vehicles (tearing up pristine landscapes) and fast foods (which they claim are healthy). Yesterday I was in a store and saw a TV ad for plastic devices to make hard-boiled eggs. I’ll bet people will actually go out and buy them. Then they’ll use them maybe once and eventually they’ll end up in a landfill somewhere.

LOL, TMB!
Furthering your demographic experiment, we must ask this:
Will the consumer-units of the Benighted States of Jeebusland be allowed to immigrate to any of the FUSA regions, or must the fences and guard-towers be erected? ;o)

Why is it that Americans seem so addicted to heart clutching, swooning drama like what we’ve just seen over the default crisis? Is it really necessary to drag things out to the bitter end, waiting weeks to come to an agreement that was outlined in the beginning? And, as one poster pointed out, it isn’t really over even now. Is it some kind of bizarre death wish or is it just the way things get done?
It really is just pointless drama. As JHK tells us, there’s no way the economy can be saved the way it’s structured now, and the old white men running things really don’t care, they’re doing just fine. To hell with the rest of us, the oblivious and too-willing grist for the mill.
Reminds me of the disgusting tv show from the fifties called “Queen for a Day” where poor folks would come on and sob their way through their sad story in hopes of winning a washing machine. The one with the saddest story wins. Perhaps that’s how the new economy will work too.
Funny that few seem to notice how the fake drama occupies us so fully that there’s no time to worry about the real business of government. That never gets done anymore but nobody has appeared to be aware of that. And another bridge crumbles somewhere, and another, and the power keeps going out for longer and longer periods of time.
We are all well and truly fucked.

Why is it that Americans seem so addicted to heart clutching, swooning drama like what we’ve just seen over the default crisis
In one of my entries last week, I may have an answer.
“America is quite clear about its screwed up priorities­. My experience has convinced me that the surest way to get Americans to act is to mess with their entertainm­ent…In other words, someone is going to have to mess with the circuses of “bread and circuses” to arouse Americans.”
Unfortunately, Americans usually act to either get their entertainment back or, if they can’t, get revenge on those who took it away. The former is why the NFL lockout was settled before the Debt Ceiling Hostage Crisis. The latter is what the people behind The Hologram fear.
I have more reactions to this past week’s news, including Why Tea Partiers hate high-speed rail, how we could have gone to the Moon several times over for the price of Afghanistan, and Debt Ceiling Cat is watching you negotiate, along with more local and national sustainability stories at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News.crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/

Pertaining to resource depletion it is a hard and cold fact that of all the iron ore ports on the Great Lakes only the port of Marquette on the north shore of the upper peninsula of Michigan still loads the bulk freighters with red ore as compared to taconite pellets. What does this tell you? Incidentally, this is not an opinion.
An opinion would be the idiotic observation made by a barbershop customer with an “army retired” license plate who claimed that capitalism works because South Korea is a richer country than North Korea so nothing else need be considered.

The human mind cannot “grok” such magnitudes. Here’s one analogy in terms of time: if someone owes you and says they will pay you back in a million seconds, that’s 12 days. No big deal. But if they then say, Oh I mispoke, I meant a billion seconds, that’s a whole nother thing – it comes out to 32 years. Imagine that, just one letter difference makes all that difference! I mean, the words even rhythme.
And a trillion? 32,000 years. In other words, we will never pay off our debt, but that wont stop them from trying to make us. But, but, but – wont that makes us serfs or slaves? Exactly.

Guys in the Game call it the Wiley Coyote Moment: a once very attractive woman suddenly realizes that she basically no longer is anything special and she’s going down fast – like Wiley as he pauses in thin air before plummeting.
This is where we “stand” – on nothing.
Asoka stage right enters and says that the bottom is a good place to be – everything is up from now on. Emptiness is the root of creativity!

Qtip, what do you think? do you ant to be in court with a muslim judge?
=================
ant?
Interesting you should ask this question. I have Jury Duty tomorrow in New Brunswick, NJ. In what city/town is this Muslim judge located?

Heh moron, what does a person’s religion have to do with his/her ability to serve in a courtroom in any function? It’s abvious that you are a bigot and a racist (albeit a young one of about 14 or 15).
Heh, did you ever get your local cops to arrest any minority kids when somebody stole your skateboard/bike last week? I will bet my next paycheck that some innocent black or Hispanic kids had to cool their heels in Juve after you got finished pointing them out to the fuzz. Your pointed index finger probably went in the direction of the first minority kids you saw.
Why don’t you just change your screen name to ‘Hitler Jugend’ and join one of those right wing youth groups that advertise on the Internet?

Now that the debt crises has been solved we can move on to the next crises. It is interesting to watch the wanderings from one crises to the next. At least this one got us away from the presidential race for a month or so.
And BTW, why isn’t the stock market rallying on this news? I want a rally, a great big bubbling rally. No one likes to watch a balloon deflate.
Aimlow Joe was herehttp://www.aimlow.com

The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Soon canoes will ply the Lakes as of old, selling beaver pelts to the many colored tribes along a thousand mile swath. Get your wampum shells now – gold. And from gold forge steel. A little bit of lead for the alchemist never hurts. As Mr Colt said, I will equalize.

A Test: say you killed an intruder into your home: would you rather have killed a White Man and face an all White judge and jury or have killed a Black Man and face an all Black judge and jury? Assuming you’re a White of course. Big assumption! No other race hates their own like this.

A Must See. Especially for those like me who are visual learners, and who don’t understand money, banks etc. even tho I know I should, cuz I am over my head in debt, thanks to the husband.
Who thinks like ripps wife that ‘everything’ is fine and I am So Negative !
I will watch this thruout the day.
Thanks for posting.

I don’t think I’ve ‘got’ it yet.
Seriously tho, It scares me and I myself don’t know what ‘we’ll’ do. Probably groups of good folks ‘helping’ eachother and gangsters getting to be more of a destructive problem.
I don’t know. It worries me. I see it and feel it coming down, it’s here.
They are Ruling by Fear. So whoever caused 9/11, gave ‘them’ the opportunity to do so. And they jumped all over it.

Oh Vlad, I beg to differ. We will attempt (and perhaps succeed) to pay off our debts via inflation. The printing presses will be running day and night for the next decade or two until they finally blow up our entire economy. But, our debt might be down to zero.
There has been some speculation that the Chinese would actually be allowed to set up ‘slave factories’ in the U.S. whereby they would demand we work and pay off our debts to them in some type of 19th Century sweatshop manner. That simply won’t happen because we have too many right wing Christian Evangelicals and assorted Southern goobers who are very well armed and would be more than willing to start a new civil war in our nation over such an offense.

“everybody in China is living in the equivalent of the 12th century”
Um, no. They’ve built whole cities, highway systems, and train lines from scratch in the last 10 years. And they’ve had like 10% GDP growth. What rock are you living under?

My sister wanted to check out the site I am always talking about. So I told her clusterfuck nation. I didn’t tell her kunstler.com. just figured she would google and find it. She found something else.
So she put in clusterfuck.com
DON’T DO IT. You can imagine what came up.
Pretty funny. I don’t go to those sites.
That’s a guy thing I suppose.

I think my reply to this is that I have served on various mixed ethnic juries and I saw no prejudice on the part of any of these people except in the case of one white woman who believed that we should throw out a lawsuit brought by an elderly black man before the case even started.

I agree, one of the best.
What to do now ?
Somehow Stay positive and hopeful, helpful, and out of angry peoples’ ways, especially on the road.
I live in a very congested area, wish I lived in a smaller community, but I am where I am. Will make the best of it.

Turkle, please be mindful of your biting tongue. If you carefully re-read JHK’s article, you should recognize that his reference to the “equivalent of the 12th century” relates to China in the 1930’s, not the China of the 21st century.

Good music. Always like Robert Cray.
I remember ‘smokin’ gun’. Just came to my mind.
Song of the Week or the day. My Last Regret by Robert Cray.
classy. I need to go out and have me some fun.
There is a blues place in town, and another place, that get big names.
Thanks for posting.

Fabe: Your overwhelming male musk has me so weak in my pretty knees that I could not help but slosh some of my ‘tini on my nylons.
I’ll bet you have a very big gun in that great big truck of yours, you hunky Caveman! Can I get one more all-caps Libtard insult from you to help me to a happy ending here?

Blacks are famous for acquitting other Blacks – despite overwhelming evidence. You must be living on some other planet. Perhaps your own mind? Ideologies like Marxism are nothing but psychic virus that make the infected incapable of seeing reality.

“I donno where you live Joe, but around here most of the pickup trucks are parked in the contractors driveway.”
They are not building here, but they are fixing things for folks who still have money or credit. And stuff needs fixing, all the time.
As for nail guns–God bless ’em. But I’m handy with a framing hammer too. I just wish I could learn to use a miter-box like grandpa. In time.

Johnny Rivers sang SWEET SMILING CHILDREN it’s on youtube. Beautiful song, beautiful guy.
You tell all the sweet smiling children ’bout your fine hair sprays and combs, lipstick perfumes fine cars and homes, so that when they find that love it will be true, but it already is, you just don’t know it.
And a TV is droning in the background.
the last line is ‘now turn off your television and go to sleep’, coming from the tv, not him singing.
JRivers was ahead of the times. and He lives close to me, wish I could meet him. One of my all time faves.
a friend of mine says “first they take it away and then they sell it back.” So true.
I’ll take a porch (with or without a house at this point) over a TV anytime.
I also saw the plastic thing for eggs. Thought the same thing as you did.

What an evocative, and appropriate simile! There is nothing permanent to stand on and probably nothing to grab onto as you fall. The most entertaining scenario at this time is to watch Obama trying to act as if he had a clue what was happening or that he’s still relevant. His expressions have ranged from his patented “Arrogant Snit” face to that of the poor, broken-down (“I just can’t get any sleep”) beaten field hand. Whichever he thinks will appeal most to his gullible base. The other party is just as pathetic and everyone in “power” is claiming “I, I, I” did it or it’s because of “me, me, me”. This will come back to haunt them.
Both my husband and I can sharpen a blade, but we also have a swedge block. You might look into one of those and think of the myriad ways it will improve a rather Spartan life.

Have you seen ‘WipeOut’ and Lockdown [or whatever prisun reality shows there are??
Q4AD was dignified compared to that.
What about ‘WifeSwap’ and ‘Makeover’?
[My info on TV is from going to the gym, where
folks are captive to it].

Have been reading Jim’s weekely vignettes now for several years, but i havent spent as much time on the commentary section. There is however, some very good and diverse viewpoints. It seems that today’s provocative piece by JHK has elicited some consensus though – the money seems to only being going to the uber capitalist level, and the so-claimed aqueous trickle-down is far more intermitent but noisier – is that early SHTF?
Would the incumbent President have enough support to assume he will remain unchallenged for the candidacy? Reports suggest there is large sections of the Democratic caucus who feel too much was, again, conceded to the flakey crop of 2010 congressional Republicans.

Does anyone think the spending cuts (if passed) will be sufficient to cover the additional debt to be created by raising the limit? Who are we kidding? We are, in fact, a bankrupt nation, utterly unable to meet our debt obligations when they become due.
I remember the shock and dismay we all felt when the national debt first exceeded ONE trillion. Whatever is accomplished by this charade, it won’t be “saving” the economy, which is way beyond help.

A technological singularity (the term should be credited to the SF writer Vernor Vinge, not the proselytizer Ray Kurzweil) doesn’t have to look like the stereotypical Rapture of the Geeks to be real. The sine qua non of a singularity is that it is a change in the way things work that makes predictions about future developments, based on prior expectations, meaningless. The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture (and the consequent accumulation of surpluses and division of labour) was the original singularity — no hunter-gatherer could have foreseen the long-term consequences. A biotech revolution could be another, transforming life unrecognizably *without* requiring an asymptotic energy budget. We may be in for hard times and a consequent adjustment of expectations, but I wouldn’t count technological change (the kind that moves forward and not backward) out of the game just yet.

No, spending cuts alone will not matter. Only if it includes elimination of the Bush tax cuts to Billionairs, and in fact an increase in the tax rates on multi-millionairs and corporations.
But that won’t happen as long as the ‘Pubs & TP’s have the votes. Nope, the budget will be balanced on the backs of whats left of the Middle-class and the poor. But not the Rich, don’t even think of asking them to make a contribution or sacrifice.
The US is heading towards a Banana Republican dictatorship pretty fast. 2012 anybody?
Dee

Would I trick you Jackie?! You can bake! That may be your ticket to survival. A good pie is a joy forever – or until it’s gone and time for the next one. In Heaven, the pies will reconstitue themselves right out of our stomachs – just like the heroes of Valhalla can.

I don’t even know what a swedge is but I like the sound of it. I’ll probably hear the word again soon and that will be my cue to go out and buy one. That’s usually how it works.
Certain words are very evocative. The highest paradise of Islam is called Ridwan. That sounds right. Another good one: Svalbard – it means the cold edge in Norse. It is the large Island in the Arctic where they have built a gigantic seed vault. The Elite know that destruction is coming. Glad someone is thinking ahead even if it has to be them.

Wallstreet is laughing their heads off while the rest of the country is tied up in this very stupid issue of our own making as they take our money and jobs to other countries. That’s the real issue. Meanwhile there are those that whine about the distraction of the size of government as the slight of hands goes on. Just like any magician knows that you distract your audience while robbing them blind.

Heh Vlad, do you have any stats behind that “blacks acquit other blacks” statement? I was on a jury with a black defendant and we had a handful of blacks in our jury and we sent the guy to prison. I can only speak from personal experience. However, my mother once showed me a tree in her Mississippi home town of Jacinto where they used to lynch black males. I guess she was just speaking from her experience too.

JHK: Thank you another informative article! But I agree with the above poster who stated yes we all understand that we are doomed( on this site anyway), so if you could begin a series of articles on what we can do to survive as an individual, neighborhood, town,county. I would appreciate a couple of items each week on evidenced based real world problems and how to deal with them. EXCELLENT peak oil, everything movie, check out BLIND SPOT on netflix instant.
Thank you JHK and all for you posts, and to the one named Vlad, I thought of you the other day when a fellow, fat, blad, blue collar white guy who is a health care worker was complaining how the “minority” nurses were giving him a hard time.

Uh, why the comments about Marxism? Do you think I’m a Marxist? Whatever gave you that idea? I took a whole bunch of Marxist history at U.C.L.A. I can guarantee you that I’m no Marxist. Why did you change your name from Jaego which you used in the past when posting on this blog? I kind of liked that name over Vlad which makes me think of Dracula.

I disagree that the debt has been solved, or even kicked down the road apiece. The crap is very likely to hit the fan this time.
The “agreement” raises the debt ceiling $2.4T, which they estimate will last 1.5 yr while supposedly cutting spending by .12T per yr. So, if passed, the “agreement” grows the problem about 15% and we get a similiar kabuki show in about 18 months.
The kicker is it is unlikely to pass quickly. Mercury goes retrograde tomorrow, which is usually indicative of delays and disagreements, not expedited agreements. Furthermore the remaining signs (astrological and political) are more inline with a coming apart over the next three weeks or so rather than cooperation.
My gut says it is time to be out of the markets (all of them), to turn paper assets into productive assets (garden tools, fences, compost, solar panels, etc) where possible, and upstock supply levels of necessities. Bankers might be taking a holiday soon, or not; but an even bet now, so some paper cash might be a good idea where safe.

Wallstreet is laughing their heads off
==
Why shouldn’t they? They have their population of greedy callous moron degenerates where they want them. $1.5 trillion dollars a year, every year, spent on the war machine, while the country is ground down to absolute poverty, moral, cultural and physical.
I say them 300 million of greedy callous moron degenerates got exactly what they deserve.

We all need to do the math.We’ve let the Repubs and Dems spend too much and it can’t be paid back.To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen we’ve got debts no honest man can pay.It’ll be an outright default or by way of inflation. Only question is how long they can kick the can down the road.In a democracy we get what we deserve.

Why is the MEDIA afraid to disclose the race of the “FLASH MOBS”?
The victims were all white. The guilty were all black. Call them what they are “BLACK MOBS” A race war has been declared in the streets of Phily!
[from yr link, I claim no experience]

Roger, TMB.
I read that when the Newt was at his clownish apogee his district was the largest beneficiary of federal largess.
It would be lovely for the BeKKKnighted States of Amrika to wake up one morning without one morning without the net inflow of federal dollars they’ve been benefitting from since at least FDR.
Welfare Queens all the south and west. Look it up.

It’s simply a case of back to the future – Clusterf#ckers!!
What’s happening today to the Anglo/Imperial conglomerate, is not so different to what happened in the fading stages of the declining Roman Empire.
You know… societal collapse due to the disintegration of the political, economic, military and other complex institutions of the Empire, that and it being overrun by barbarian invaders…
And don’t-cha just lurve those social hierarchy terms of aristocrats, plebeians and slaves, where are you in that pecking order?
*sniggers*
Rome was only powerful while it expanded, and only while the stolen wealth of the conquered peoples was channeled into its core.
But when Hadrian decided to fix the boundaries of the Empire, its chances to plunder wealth from the outside ceased. This game play change meant that materials it consumed from outside its clutches had to be paid for with minted cash, rather than taken by brute Roman force.
And achieving stability on its borders was done by buying favours from neighbouring tribes, so by default taxes had to increase – BIG TIME!! Inflation became rampant and the currency was increasingly debased…
(Any of this sounding vaguely familiar?)
Gradually… the Empire ran out of money, and as Rome – the epicentre lost its grip on power – so for a while some of the other provincial cities became stronger, depending on what they held in reserve assets and cash. Then when control at the centre totally failed, chaos ruled the day, and the whole creaking infrastructure came down…
(Yep… that SHTF moment)
All the empires cities then withered and died as they could no longer trade for any of the raw materials they required. And the countryside then ceased to supply the food that those once powerful cities depended on…
The rest is history…
This process did not happen simultaneously across the Empire, as in some places roman culture continued on for many decades after Rome fell.
(But here’s the interesting part)
What happened to the population of Rome when it finally collapsed? What is certain is that at its peak, the population was over 1m people, a huge mass of which were made up of the slaves of course.
However, after the collapse with wars, famine, disease and emigration the population of Rome was reduced to a pathetic few thousand as low as 30,000 at one stage; a far cry from its height of power just a few hundred years earlier.
The implications of which, shouldn’t be lost to a 21st century world…
Nite y’all!

Asia sez:
I dont have any info on China/Idaho but I know Soros and The Reds are buying up Africa.
Heh dimwit, where did you get that info, from the weekly youth meetings at your local John Birch Society?
One of the first things that mommy and daddy should have taught you is that if you are going to make an extraordinary claim, then back it up with extraordinary evidence and I don’t mean from ‘Teen’ magazine.
These are Asia’s thought processes:
Soros is a Communist.
Soros is in league with the worldwide Reds.
Some land was recently sold in Africa.
Therefore, Soros and the Reds are buying up Africa.
P.S. Did your local cops finally find your “jacked” skateboard/bike and return it to you? If so, then you should have mommy bake some cookies and you can skate them over to your local police station.

chris: “the final commentary on the American Empire.Beggars lining the streets that take traffic out of Detroit and out onto the bridge from the USA”
To get back to Canada from Detroit, you take either the tunnel (downtown) or the bridge. The Ambassador Bridge has to be reached by a convoluted route because its owner Matty Moroun, the same billionaire slumlord who owns the infamous Michigan Central Station property, forces traffic to go through his duty-free store — he has extorted various concessions there from the Michigan legislature. From surface streets you have to take the West Grand overpass across I-75. It’s rare nowadays that I don’t pass someone begging for change or food at that corner. If you stop at the light they’ll be right at your window.

Ron Paul spot on as usual:
“No plan under serious consideration cuts spending in the way you and I think about it. Instead, the “cuts” being discussed are illusory, and are not cuts from current amounts being spent, but cuts in projected spending increases. This is akin to a family “saving” $100,000 in expenses by deciding not to buy a Lamborghini, and instead getting a fully loaded Mercedes, when really their budget dictates that they need to stick with their perfectly serviceable Honda. ”zerohedge.com/news/ron-paul-exposes-deficit-plan-lies-cuts-are-illusory-not-current-amounts-spent-pr…

It’s sad to see that some of the least eloquent commenters on this blog continually resorting to the lowest form of potty-mouthed abuse whenever they are cornered with a argumentatively challenging situation.
Whilst a proponent of Queen’s English (being a native Brit) it never fails to amaze me how the most cerebrally challenged amongst us can repeatedly arrive with new constructs and additions to the standard English written language.
It has been a true education to me to see that one who associates with a society which promotes democratic socialism, not through revolution, but by reformist means has stooped to the depths of profanity and linguistic corruption in a vain attempt to add emphasis to their pathetic argumentative status.
Pray tell, what precisely is a FUCKTARD? (Notice the discrete use of capital letters to emphasize this point – for the hard of understanding). Is it some lame brained construct of fucking retard. Is that a retard who fucks, or neither a fucker nor a retard, but when combined into a verbal construct defines one that is undoubtedly a stupid piece of shit.
And equally noticeable is the continued use of MORON – again notice the emphasis in captitalization, thought necessary by the contributor who is clearly unaware of the richness and subtlety of the English language. Is our colleague describing a disused term for a person with a mental age between 8 and 12, and a common insult for a person considered stupid – or is two syllables and five letters about the limit of his linguistic resources?
I put it to you all, is our co-contributor genuinely linguistically challenged or merely an online Tourette’s Syndrome victim, engaged in one desperate plea to have his point of view and status recognized?

Why did you change your name from Jaego which you used in the past when posting on this blog? I kind of liked that name over Vlad which makes me think of Dracula.
—————————————–
Little vlad probably changed his name because he got banned for being a racist scumbag who was embarressing JHK for being on his blog. But I think JHK just gave up trying to get rid of the guy. You have to feel sorry for the poor little bastard.
As for why he thinks you are a Marxist? He just likes to throw around terms like that to suggest he is something other than a frightened loser. He often poses as an authority on things he knows little of nothing about, part of his efforts to improve his tormented self image.

Nice post Alexandra. Someone recently stated that America is Rome on steroids. However, the Romans never had a Wall Street and credit default swaps. If they had, perhaps they would have just fallen on their swords and never bothered to fight back against the Germanic tribes.

Okay, do I have a choice to pick a side ?
I hope so.
okay will google what you recommended, and maybe learn something.
thanks.
I’m thinking you’re thinking the gang side.
Gotta get me some homeboys, and girls.
Well will have to look into that.

More Buddhist tough luv from the Wu Li Master of Crap. Dale: you’ve got to get a realistic self image or else your meditation is in vain. Forget about it for now. Meditate on Freud’s, “Where id (it) is, there I (ego) shall be”. But you’ve got to see the Truth about your own nastiness first. Your Id is in control – supported by your Super Ego. There is actually very little “you” there at all. You can only begin to fight this once you’ve seen it.

“The Ambassador Bridge has to be reached by a convoluted route because its owner Matty Moroun, the same billionaire slumlord who owns the infamous Michigan Central Station property, forces traffic to go through his duty-free store — he has extorted various concessions there from the Michigan legislature.” -Elrond
And, there ya go.
“Regular Folks” can no longer afford to support leeches and cream-skimmers like Matty the Moron. “Invest” in solid infrastructure… sturdy lampposts may be handy items (even without power). As for the legislators? There will come consequences worse than being voted out of office. Haven’t they seen the movie? Or perhaps there’s a “can’t happen here/these days” hubris goin’ on… until it does. Oopsie-doodle!

Thanks Dale, I thought this was the same person from long ago and I was right about that. Some people are very quick to label other folks. I read an article today from a scientist who tried to explain it in evolutionary terms. It comes down to ‘us versus them’ and it’s easier to do if the ‘them’ have different colored skin or their eyes are shaped differently.

Bet you are. Classic economic Marxism has been largely superseded by cultural Marxism. Gramsci and Adorno realized that the first could never work without the second being in place. Instead of just hating the lower and middle classes for their disinterest and rejection, they vowed to change them. And they did via Goveremnt handouts for the lower and university study for the middle.
So now we have a stealth Marxism. The big Goverment Bureacrats are often Marxists, but they keep it quiet when dealing with the public. In terms of economics, insead of socializing the means of production as in Marxism 1.0, the fruits of production are socialized via taxation and means are contolled via Federal Laws. Obviously this falls most heavily on small and medium sized business. The Corporations are in with the Bureacrats – another devlopment of Marxism 2.
Even Marxim 1 was more than meets the eye. Who financed the Revolutions? After all, peasants with mattocks don’t get very far….As Orangutang told Charlton Heston, don’t look too closely, you may not like what you see – though you probably would have no problem with it.

A far more interesting topic than man’s apocalypse fantasies is nature’s apocalyptic realities, like overshoot and die-off being a very real and common occurrence in natural ecosystems. Given mankind’s current trajectory, I see this scenario being far more likely than one where we ride into the sunset and live happily ever after or even muddle along for hundreds of years without some major catastrophes putting the kibosh on our endless growth hallucination. That’s the fantasy of the endless cornucopia where the earth has a creamy nugget center filled with petrol. In reality, humans will trash the place completely and then start dying en masse from their pollution, like yeast in the mash.
But this wouldn’t be an apocalypse for Nature. She doesn’t care. So, in reality, it won’t be an apocalypse, just a bunch of dead monkeys. Those ants probably think that the “End is nigh” when you step on their dirt hole. There is nothing good or evil but thinking makes it so.

Prince Vlad III of Wallachia was also known as ‘Dracula’ and ‘Vlad the Impaler’. I have never killed or tortured anybody and I don’t suck the blood from people so you must have another reason for thinking of me as a ‘Dracula.’ By the way, I wasn’t taking a shot at Vlad (aka Jaego) by suggesting that he was some type of bloodsucker. The name ‘Vlad’ does make me think of the original ‘Son of the Dragon’.

Would I trick you ? You had BETTER Not !
yeah I have had an idea forever. think it would fly, it ain’t pies. can’t tell ya cuz then i’d have to …. .. top secret.
before I ever saw espresso / coffee to go, I mentioned it to a guy here who had a coffee shop.
he shut down. I think he is the one who actually started them for real. I have great ideas.
I actually didn’t want to be selling ‘speed’ to drivers.’ they drive bad enough.
but those places made and still make tons of $$$.
but you know the RENTS are so fucking high here.
the way to go is mobile, like they have these catering trucks in cities. high end. great food.
I am talking rent here for 150 sq ft. 850 + mo.
no way. just gonna make someone else rich(er).
I could get an old ice cream truck type thing and use that. (and live out of it also wtshtf).
Pies for Guys. guys LOVE pie. not lemon squares, I know that.
The Pie Guy. Here in CA the gay Pie guy. thought you’d like that. I’m not a guy and I’m not gay, it just rhymed and came out.
I do think I will take a cooking class. Always room for learning.
I HAVE to get off this thing, the work isn’t gonna do itself.
🙂

Yes, they import some chopsticks and export everything that is found in your local Wal-mart, Target, K-mart, Apple store, etc.
Other places have all the wood to make chopsticks, and China has the cheap labor and factories to pump out iPods, iPads, and iCheapPlasticCrap. It makes sense to me.
Anyways, as an American, where do you get off criticizing another country for importing things, given the US’s gigantic trade deficits? Do we actually make anything here anymore besides bombs and Hummers?

Both democratic and republican philosophies got us where we are today. we are going to have to combine some of both along with new ideas to make some headway. you listed some dead republican policies. As far as the dems are concerned, worshiping at the alter of diversity and endless entitlements is over also.

Heh Turkle, a word to the wise. You better be very careful criticizing this guy. He’s liable to find out your home address and then cruise over to your place and beat out your Malibu lights with this wooden skateboard.
Or, he will squeal to the local cops that you tried to sell him some cigarettes and we all know how the police feel about an adult “corrupting” a minor.

China, according to their own stats, has 600 million living on $1000/yr and 400 million living on $2000/yr. So what if they have a hwy and a bullet train. The main thing we have to worry about is not ever getting to 600 million people, much less a billion.

Here we are, back to Marxism again. Are you and Metuselah channeling once more? Are there Marxists, Bilderbergers, Luddites, etc. all waiting and planning and plotting right now for a second Obama term in office?

1) You said “we.” How can you presume to speak for a bunch of anonymous people on a blog? Did you take a poll? Especially considering how much you get banned here, I wouldn’t take your opinion as indicative of any common consensus. Or are you some kind of collective entity? (That would explain the voluminous posts throughout the day.)
2) If you don’t care, why did you bother replying?
3) Nervous nellie….where’d you get that from, Leave It To Beaver reruns? You need to update your lingo.
4) “so shut it, asshole” You first Ban Boy. I think I can safety speak for everyone on this blog when I say that we are sick of your stench. (Yes, I took a poll, and you lost.)

Yes, but weren’t we arguing about whether JHK’s flippant remark about the Chinese living in the “12th century” was accurate? I submit that it is not. And I wasn’t saying that China is some perfect utopia of the 21st century.
Of course, he is prone to speak in hyperbole, which I understand, but it kind of gets old week after week. What’s the point, really?

I think we’ve discovered today that the way to take some of the meanness out of Big Ol’ Fabe is to bat one’s gin-soaked eyelashes at his throbbing, musky F350. It calms him…
Unless … he’s a she?
Fabe, you’re not Ann Coulter trolling here are you honey? Have you had that Adam’s apple checked for goiters?

A poor village under attack by bandits recruits seven unemployed samurai to help them defend themselves.
got this far so far. I want to see the movie think I can online. Or can rent it.
also want to see the youtube video about bankers, and money posted above.
So much to learn in between cleaning and cooking.

I ordered the cd from the local library.
Well I would love to be a farmer, with protection.
But I can see myself as a Samurai. Need some serious weaponry tho.
either way. to be a civilian and do nothing is what I don’t want to be.
hope that makes sense, I haven’t seen the movie yet, maybe it will happen in real life before the movie comes to me, someones got it now and I have to wait.
Am studying it anyway. will check the mag 7 movie now.

Yes Jackie – slices of pie as opposed to squares. The slices subliminally suggest a woman’s nether regions to “hungry” men.
Sorry to be crude – but life is however we dress it up or hide it. If you want to get into business you’ll have to be able to recognize these realities.

Isn’t it true that the Indians, with all their high tech computer programmers, science and technology, also named their nuclear bombs after Hindu gods?
Perhaps Armageddon and The Secomd Coming via wars caused by resource depletion are simply “scientific” ways for expressing prophecy?
The know not what they do….

You’re right about Vlad being a great warrior and a patriot to his own people. The only problem with ole Vlad was that he kind of got carried away and impaled thousands of his own people along with the Turks he captured. It was said that he would impale nursing babies to the breasts of their already impaled mothers. And he seemed to have enjoyed impaling young peasant girls when they were believed to have lost their virginity out of wedlock. Oh Vlad old buddy old pal, where are you when a degenerate America is forsaking its Christian morality and the Evangelicals so need you?

Obama, boy, what a loser. Just reading about this debt deal, sounds like to me that Obama went out, bought the lube, then stripped down and bent over in front of Congress and let the ‘Pubs line up and fuck him.
What a loser.
The average American is fucked no matter how you look at it. Do they even realize it?
Geesh….
Bet the WS Banksters are tossing down the Cristal Bubbly tonite!
Dee

Them people were not his people. Them people were German Catholic interlopers with a mission on behalf of the Vatican.
Here we go again, another secretive mission but this time in Medieval Eastern Europe.

Oh Auntie Soak, please don’t beat me with that switch like you used to. I promise to never give out one of them cocktail recipes again. Vlad can make his own moonshine if he really needs a buzz that bad.

The status quo won that is all. And to think JHK dumped his T-bills last week, well he and Bill Gross can have a meet up and cry in their beers. But then again JHK supported all those wars which we spend 1 trillion on per year.
Tactically I would say Obama stuffed the Republicons, strategically our hapless president has the economy about his neck, advantage Republicons.
Mortgage rates at my credit union dropped like a rock, in one week my cash flow prospects via the mortgage payment have increased by 11%, ain’t depression great?

Babies to their moms? Are you sure? That shit’s not right. He used to nail turbans to Muslim heads – that’s not as bad.
In any case, history is an art. And part of the art is looking the other way. When was the last time you heard Jews talking about the 20,000 Christians they sacraficed? It happened when the Persians defeated the Byzantines in Palestine. The Jews bought the Christians from the Persians.
There’s more – much more. Read the unedited version of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. And remember, Gibbon was no friend of Christianity.
Goethe said it best: History is a nightmare from which I am seeking to awaken. My point: let no group pretend to be outside the horror. We can do better but we have all sinned. The key to doing better is to go back to the Nation State. This kind of Utopianism, or Tikkun Olam is a recipe for oceans of blood. Borders help limit the damadge. The Jewish idea that since God is One, Man must be too is pernicious – especially since they don’t really believe it. Christianity used to uphold the idea of Nationhood, but alas they have caught the Globo Bug too.

Who do you think financed the wars and warlords on Europe for last 1000 years? That’s not a secret. Why don’t you look it up?
Why not also find out who financed the Rothschild/Morgan, who then set up the FED and the CIA? What are you so afraid of?

The Jewish idea that since God is One, Man must be too is pernicious
==
No, that’s a Christian/Islamic idiocy. Don’t attribute that idiocy to Jews.
Jews don’t want anybody but Jews to be Jews. We don’t care what dumb fsck god you worship, because your dumb fsck god is not our god. Nor are we interested in any of that idiotic lunacy. We’re passed that insanity. The only reason I even pay attention to you dumb fscks is because it is Christian and Islamic fscks that are constantly vying for empire and absorptions of others into their dumb fsck cults. I don’t want to be saved by your dumb fsck imperialist cults. I want you thieving imperialists the fsck out.

There’s a story from Africa – I’m not swearin’ that it’s true, just passing it along. A missionary had to go away for a week. He told his foreman to expect a shipment of wheelbarrows while he was away. He got a telegram telling him to return – the workers were very angry, getting injured, quitting, etc. He returned to see the native workers using the wheelbarrows just as they had used the baskets – carrying them on their head or shoulder. Those new baskets were a motherfucker!

Karl Marx came from a long line of Rabbis. As Moses Hess said, “Communism is Judaism”. Judaism for other people that is, second class people who aren’t the Chosen.
And now your gentile zombies have returned to you wondering why you don’t BELIEVE. Hitler predicted as much.
Professor Kevin MacDonald has addressed this issue: the Elite are not synomous with the Jewish People but they do have a special relationship. David Icke also wondered why the Jews let the Elite hide behind them. MacDonald answers because the Jews benefit from this relationship. My point: Not for very much longer. The advent of Eurabia is a case in point.

I’m afraid you’re right – we are going to be easy prey for new enemies. The government is broke, overextended in its military entanglements; no money to pay for more of the usual (entitlements, stimulus, healthcare, banking rescues, a raft of defense contractors and the expensive toys they make.) There’s no real money left to pay for those things, just the vapor money the banks use, the declining fiat currency the Fed issues.
The extreme right members in the Republican tent can not see America in decline, let alone contemplate the reasons (not anything external, only due to liberals, spending, and Democrats) Being knocked off the pillar as the world’s major economic and military power will not sit well with them. In 2012 we could have a Bush 3.0 in power, trying to relive the “easy” victory of Iraq ’91.
The old alignments we were used to may not hold. Even historical friends and allies in Europe and South America may turn away from us to save themselves – they will push back to avoid being dragged down into the US CF. New alliances could find it convenient to do the same – China’s not as strong or as unified as most westerners fear (they have their internal corruption and ethnic strife; inflation, food troubles, and oil dependency that rarely makes the news) but their desperation may push them into Africa and Arabia. Russia likes us only as long as “your interests don’t interfere with my interests” as Vito Corleone would put it. We and Arabia are akin to the “drug dealer/addict” relationship more than a business partnership.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we get chased out of the Middle East in the next 20 years (maybe militarily, but more likely just shut out of the business of extracting cheap oil.)

David Icke also wondered why the Jews let the Elite hide behind them.
==
A handful of Jewish fscks that the Vatican/CIA likes to showcase as scapegoats don’t make “DA JEWS”. We are a nation of some 20 million people. Capish!? David Icke is a racist fsck. And is probably a Vatican/CIA sith.

That’s not crude. I get it. I KNEW there was a real reason. got by me.
Makes sense. Maybe I could cut the squares into
V’s. triangles. and put whip cream on top.
(sorry to be crude).
anyway, thanks for the tip.

August 1, 2011
Obama’s Big Payback to Wall Street
The Worst Deal in American History?
By MIKE WHITNEY
Is Obama’s debt ceiling agreement the worst deal in US history?
Probably. But not for the reasons that are presently being discussed in the media. What makes the deal such an unmitigated disaster is that it strips congress of its Constitutional authority to control the nation’s purse-strings. That authority will be handed over to a bipartisan committee that will decide how to slash $1.5 trillion from the budget in order to reduce the deficits. But, since the committee will be evenly comprised of Republicans and Democrats, there’s bound to be disagreement about what programs should be cut. This is all by design, because if the committee is unable to decide where the cutbacks should be, then the decision will be made for them via an “enforcement mechanism” that will require across-the-board spending cuts.
Pretty sinister, eh? It’s is a backdoor way of repealing Congress’s primary authority while making austerity the default position of the US Government. Whenever in doubt, “Cut spending”. Naturally, the GOP refused any agreement that would involve new taxes.
This is from the White House website:
“The Deal Locks in a Process to Enact $1.5 Trillion in Additional Deficit Reduction Through a Bipartisan, Bicameral Congressional Committee: The deal creates a bipartisan, bicameral Congressional Committee that is charged with enacting $1.5 trillion in additional deficit reduction by the end of the year….
To Meet This Target, the Committee Will Consider Responsible Entitlement and Tax Reform. This means putting all the priorities of both parties on the table – including both entitlement reform and revenue-raising tax reform…..The deal includes an automatic sequester on certain spending programs to ensure that—between the Committee and the trigger—we at least put in place an additional $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction by 2013.”
Not surprisingly, liberal pundits everywhere are moaning that Obama was “mugged” or worse, that he was “blackmailed”.
What nonsense. This is the plan that Obama wanted from the very beginning, liberals were just unwilling to listen until now. They were too caught up with his lofty oratory and his personal history as if that was surefire proof of a kind heart and a progressive outlook.
Well, guess what? It’s not. The man is not who he pretends to be. Here’s a clip from a speech Obama gave in November 2008, before he even took office, and long before the budget deficits had become a problem:
“Our economy is trapped in a vicious cycle: the turmoil on Wall Street means a new round of belt-tightening for families and businesses on Main Street ….we’ll have to scour our federal budget, line-by-line, and make meaningful cuts and sacrifices as well.”
Huh? You mean Obama was prattling the right-wing mantra before he ever set foot in the Oval Office?
Uh huh; which explains why he picked the two losers most responsible for the Crash of ’08 to lead his economics team; Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama devotees shrugged off the appointments as a rookie error unwilling to breach any criticism of the Dear Leader. Even now, they cry “Foul”, claiming Obama was either hoodwinked or –get this–a “poor negotiator”.
Get real. Obama is as far right as you can get without donning a Tricorn hat and joining a militia. Don’t believe it?
Here’s an excerpt from his book Audacity of Hope where he gushingly praises his boyhood hero, Ronald Reagan:
“Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces, but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, person responsibility, optimism, and faith.
That Reagan’s message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his skills as a communicator; it also spoke to the failures of liberal government, during a period of economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them. For the fact was that government at every level had become too cavalier about spending taxpayer money. Too often, bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates. A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities. Reagan may have exaggerated the sins of the welfare state, and certainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies tilted heavily toward economic elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties while unions were busted and the income for the average working stiff flatlined.
Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of a common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And the more his critics carped, the more those critics played into the role he’d written for them–a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites (Audacity of Hope, 31-32). (Excerpt from, Christopher Caldwell, What Obama Owes to Reagan, Daily Kos)
Have you ever heard a progressive opine so breathlessly on the Gipper’s virtues or palaver about hard working, law abiding patriotic Americans, all of which is code for flag-waving right-wing fanatics?
Obama wasn’t blackmailed; he’s as corporate as they come. Just look at the record. Here’s an excerpt from an article by FAIR’s Jeff Cohen:
“In 2006, a relatively new Senator Obama was the only senator to speak at the inaugural gathering of the Alexander Hamilton Project launched by Wall Street Democrats like Robert Rubin and Roger Altman, Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and deputy secretary. Obama praised them as “innovative, thoughtful policymakers.” (It was Rubin’s crusade to deregulate Wall Street in the late ’90s that led directly to the economic meltdown of 2008 and our current crisis.)
In early 2007, way before he was a presidential frontrunner, candidate Obama was raising more money from Wall Street interests than all other candidates, including New York presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.
In June 2008, as soon as Hillary ended her campaign, Obama went on CNBC, shunned the “populist” label and announced: “Look: I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.” He packed his economic team with Wall Street friends — choosing one of Bill Clinton’s Wall Street deregulators, Larry Summers, as his top economic advisor.” (“Obama is NOT “Caving” to Corporate Interests, Jeff Cohen, Smirking Chimp)
Obama has been zeroing in on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security from the very beginning. Why else would Wall Street throw their support behind a total “unknown”; a two year senator with no foreign policy experience and a background in community organizing. That’s hardly the type of resume that makes one a shoo-in for Empire’s top-spot. There must have been a quid pro quo, a tacit understanding that if Obama was elected, he’d carry out the corporate/Big Finance agenda. And, so he has.
The debt ceiling fiasco just proves that Obama keeps his promises. In other words, it’s “payback time.”
Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com

Mea culpa. I restrained myself heroically for many months, but one ALL CAPS FUCKTARD and I, I, I just could … not … resist tweaking the King Ranch Pickup Cowboy with the Great Cunctator’s moniker.
My offers to JHK to monitor the comments have fallen on a deaf keyboard.

Karl Marx came from a long line of Rabbis.
==
Karl Marx was paid agent of the Vatican/Bankers. As for the “long line of Rabbis”, they are probably the same long line of Bnei Brit Litvaks/Polacks the Vatican is financing right now, and at which Q likes to roll his eyes. I’d prefer that instead of batting his eyelashes, he’d grab a bat and do something useful for a change.

Thanks Dolan. You’re a nice guy for a Cultural Marxist. I’d like to talk to you after you had a few. I bet I could get you to say the N word and start telling war stories about your bad experiences with Blacks. All Whites who have had extensive contact with them has their own stories. That you can’t admit this or can’t remember is just a measure of the split in your consciousness. Alcohol can help. I’m a racial therapist who tries to help Whites remember who they are and regain health.

Well, it looks like being editor of the Harvard Law Review means you end up being a more saavy negotiator, with chess-like strategy. The Republicans just got taken to the cleaners. Rush Limbaugh is furious with the Democratic victory “deal.”
President Obama won major concessions by ensuring the debt limit is not “held hostage” and up for another vote in just a few months (something the Republicans wanted) and also by protecting domestic programs including Pell Grants and Medicaid (something the Republicans did not want).
Now, thanks to Obama, no matter what, the Bush tax cuts for the rich will end, whether by veto if Republicans push them along, by the failure of the super committee for tax reform to act or when they expire in January 2013.
Another Obama victory is the trigger mechanism. If Congress fails to act on raising the debt limit again, the trigger would go into effect in December and automatically cut domestic and defense spending 50-50 beginning in January 2013.
Got to hand it to Obama. He outsmarted Boehner and McConnell at every turn… and ultimately got what clearly constitutes a long-term solution which easily guarantees Obama’s re-election (well, this “deal” and getting Osama bin Laden).

Mr. Kunstler,
Yeah, James! Get down! One of my favorites. It’s even given me some clarity into how Capitol Records was able to sell a zillion copies of “Sloop John B” to a buncha’ landlocked kids in the middle of corn and soybean country.
As Always,
Charles DeGaulle

I have this vision of the President and John Beohner in private. Mr. Obama has his white shirt sleeves rolled up and he’s leaning his head into his hands while saying “Damn, John. You’re just a dumbass aren’t you?”

That’s what I had to do to get my cheese. You can try, and try, and try. Some motherfuckers just don’t get it. Or, and even I hate to use this word, they think you’re a punk.
Best Wishes,
Zsa Zsa Gabor

DO NOTHING
The hardest thing to do is nothing. But that is what should be done and what we all should do, simply do nothing, now you can be lazy freely, now you can finally be as lazy as you want without any guilt complexes, protestant work ethic and such, just give up, roll over and die, or do nothing at all, total void, absolutely nothing at all, you better like being bored, watch TV, write some crap on this blog and such but essentially try doing as much nothing as possible, try doing less and less of nothing, try being a total void, try no activity as hard and as much as possible, you can do it, man, go man go, do it. Why ? because there are NO SOLUTIONS to any problems, the fact that there is no cause and effect mechanism that can change the way things play out, they play out anyways, independent of anything you do, no one is in control really, no one, no matter how powerful you think they are (their power is always nearly zero although everyone thinks they have all of this power and even if they have all the cash in the world), their is no action and reaction that they or anyone at all can do that can drive the way things play out in any particular direction (aside from the fact that there are essentially 7 billion different directions, all contrasting, all opposite of each other, that anyone wants for the things to play out as).
What is even more interesting is that no matter how perfect your analysis or decoding of reality, no matter how correct it is in all possible reasons and logic, no matter how scientific and correct and logical your models of economy and cause and effect mechanisms (such as you know that less taxes will surely just kill more jobs, so taxes should increase and we scientifically need free salaries and cheap rents if the desired direction we want for the economy is “more growth” and “less poverty” and such), there is no concrete decision, no concrete choice, nothing that can be done to make the economy go in that desired direction, no matter what. It is as if we have a perfect model of everything, we know everything, we can even imagine all kinds of choices and effects and causes and effects that “should” bring forth a certain result, but nothing will ever work, knowing the causes and effects doesn’t mean we can manipulate it, in fact we can’t manipulate anything at all, we should just learn to give up real fast, end of story. Any choice we make, any direction we try to make the economy go (or anything else for that matter), no matter what, whether right wing or left wing choices, it doesn’t matter, the result will be in no way related to what we wanted, will be completely independent of what we desired, will contradict any and all of our models completely and totally, we are doomed to fail no matter what, the model is totally disconnected from any concrete activity, any concrete manipulation we can imagine, it will go in any direction it wants, all by itself no matter how we push it and try to manipulate it, no matter how we force it, it will be a circus of unintended consequences, a joke on the model, a joke on all of us.
And why is this ? Whether you want to know it or not, whether it is even important to know it or not, and even knowing or not doesn’t change anything, but anywho’s the “why is this ?” is simply because the system we are trying to manipulate (we decoded it in all possible ways, we have thousands of perfect decodings of the system no doubt) is chaotic, random, is full of quirks, is full of conflicts, large and small, is totally random, unpredictable, is saturated with the free wills of individuals which means that what they do and how they act is essentially outside of any rules and nay, even the laws of physics, is just an instantaneous interaction of random forces, some lose, some win, end of story, it is just an extension of the three body problem, it is a problem without any solution, an equation that has no solution, end of story.
So, there are no solutions, there is no effort you can do, no job you can do, and in fact the “jobs” thing is really funny: there has never been an era where jobs are so totally irrelevant and meaningless as today, exactly the moment (and this has been a long moment that started a few decades ago) that the Technological Economy was doing away with the entire concept of jobs, efforts that bring results, meritocracy, you have to deserve it, “hard work” and such by automation, optimization, agriculture mechanization, technology and transportation and electronics bringing forth huge economies of scale, huge amplifications of effects, huge excess productive capacity in all possible endeavors, all of a sudden the myth of “hard work” and “more effort”, and the “workaholics” myth, and the “more education”, the “skill sets” myth, in short the myth of meritocracy and inequality justifying your “job” and such became popular, became the dominant economic model, exactly when all of this was becoming no longer applicable, obsolete, no longer connected or relevant in any way to the economy.
In fact we need, less meritocracy, we need less “you have to deserve it” and more forced equality through free salaries and cheap rents in order to discharge the huge pent up, excess productive capacity manufacturing has worldwide, not the myth of “hard work” and meritocracy, we need the exact opposite.
I heard some banks in the EU and USA want to get rid of a few thousand workers, but those workers are not only an independent variable of what the banks do, they are a totally irrelevant variable, their work was worth zero whether they are in those banks or not, the entire idea of “work being necessary” to get “results”, effort brings results, in this service economy is a joke, those workers weren’t needed in the first place, they were there just as a place holder, just because the dominant economic forces have such a huge amount of cash that they truly don’t know what to do with it so they hire a few slobs just to get rid of some, just because, only to hose them when they feel like it, just for fun, because they are bored.
The effect the bank workers on result today is mostly the same effect that pebble down the street has on your TV set: zero, not related, not connected, irrelevant. The bank and so many other economic entities operate only according to power relationships, only according to some kinds of economic relationships, some kinds of monopoly, or status relationships, just because they are set up to make huge amounts of money automatically, as in automatic for the people, but especially automatic to those lucky enough to gain from some monopolistic type of relationship, like Apple selling like crazy because they are “fashionable” (not because those simple computers that are the iphones and ipads actually do anything new or better), same for Mercedes and BMW, and IBM and so forth and so on. They operate not because of the “effort” of their workers (which is, even when needed a dime a dozen like in the foxconn factories) but mostly because of a certain relationship that guarantees them a steady income just because, because they brainwashed most people through their marketing or because they have relationships amongst strong economic forces that “help each other” etc.
So then why did I write this block of text ? If nothing has any effect, if there is no investment that can give you any return anymore, then why write all of this garbage I wrote ? just because, because writing it or not is the equivalent of doing nothing, has no effect on anything, is useless, nay what I wrote is probably all false, or just to piss off some horny gal on this site (as I am ph*k denied) and such, just to be a creep, I creep myself out constantly, etc.
In fact, often by doing something you get mostly negative results, you lose instead of gaining, actually doing nothing is the most productive thing you can do, an economy with everything exactly dead is the richest possible.
Because the brain – mind can’t get over the fact that it must DO NOTHING, it is too used to, programmed too deeply to put “effort” in something with the hope of some “result” (but we make up all kinds of imaginary results with imaginary rituals and efforts anyways, we will make believe we gain and achieve even when there is no gain anyways (or gaining is arbitrarily defined, it can be assigned infinite just because, so I gained infinitely by writing this block of text, and such all fun and games)), but doing nothing or something is the same, it is all equivalent, the mind brain decides to disjoint them and make them opposites and make them define each other reciprocally, but none of it is true or false (other inventions) it is all a make believe world anyways, and doing nothing is actually doing everything, is achieving infinity constantly, or doing or not doing is equal, or undefined, or make up anything you want.WATCH TV, END OF STORY.

As a corollary reference:ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=176094
“NO SOLUTION.
Does anyone really think that any problem can be solved ? Does anyone really think that there are any possible “solutions” to any problem ? Well, I got news for you, there are NO SOLUTIONS to any problems, end of story. We are destined to fail BIG TIME in all possible endeavors, we are failed from the outset, failed even before we being, we have failed, end of story. Aside from the fact that there are an infinite amount of problems that don’t even pretend to have a solution, and we all know it, even though we keep on trying to fool ourselves and make believe that we are achieving and trying to solve the problems, we are progressing in our path to the solution. But problems don’t exist from the outset, we just invent them, we just make believe that we have to solve problems, that there are problems, that we must go from A to B, when in most cases, who cares, stay in A, it doesn’t matter, etc.”DO NOTHING
The hardest thing to do is nothing. But that is what should be done and what we all should do, simply do nothing, now you can be lazy freely, now you can finally be as lazy as you want without any guilt complexes, protestant work ethic and such, just give up, roll over and die, or do nothing at all, total void, absolutely nothing at all, you better like being bored, watch TV, write some crap on this blog and such but essentially try doing as much nothing as possible, try doing less and less of nothing, try being a total void, try no activity as hard and as much as possible, you can do it, man, go man go, do it. Why ? because there are NO SOLUTIONS to any problems, the fact that there is no cause and effect mechanism that can change the way things play out, they play out anyways, independent of anything you do, no one is in control really, no one, no matter how powerful you think they are (their power is always nearly zero although everyone thinks they have all of this power and even if they have all the cash in the world), their is no action and reaction that they or anyone at all can do that can drive the way things play out in any particular direction (aside from the fact that there are essentially 7 billion different directions, all contrasting, all opposite of each other, that anyone wants for the things to play out as).
What is even more interesting is that no matter how perfect your analysis or decoding of reality, no matter how correct it is in all possible reasons and logic, no matter how scientific and correct and logical your models of economy and cause and effect mechanisms (such as you know that less taxes will surely just kill more jobs, so taxes should increase and we scientifically need free salaries and cheap rents if the desired direction we want for the economy is “more growth” and “less poverty” and such), there is no concrete decision, no concrete choice, nothing that can be done to make the economy go in that desired direction, no matter what. It is as if we have a perfect model of everything, we know everything, we can even imagine all kinds of choices and effects and causes and effects that “should” bring forth a certain result, but nothing will ever work, knowing the causes and effects doesn’t mean we can manipulate it, in fact we can’t manipulate anything at all, we should just learn to give up real fast, end of story. Any choice we make, any direction we try to make the economy go (or anything else for that matter), no matter what, whether right wing or left wing choices, it doesn’t matter, the result will be in no way related to what we wanted, will be completely independent of what we desired, will contradict any and all of our models completely and totally, we are doomed to fail no matter what, the model is totally disconnected from any concrete activity, any concrete manipulation we can imagine, it will go in any direction it wants, all by itself no matter how we push it and try to manipulate it, no matter how we force it, it will be a circus of unintended consequences, a joke on the model, a joke on all of us.
And why is this ? Whether you want to know it or not, whether it is even important to know it or not, and even knowing or not doesn’t change anything, but anywho’s the “why is this ?” is simply because the system we are trying to manipulate (we decoded it in all possible ways, we have thousands of perfect decodings of the system no doubt) is chaotic, random, is full of quirks, is full of conflicts, large and small, is totally random, unpredictable, is saturated with the free wills of individuals which means that what they do and how they act is essentially outside of any rules and nay, even the laws of physics, is just an instantaneous interaction of random forces, some lose, some win, end of story, it is just an extension of the three body problem, it is a problem without any solution, an equation that has no solution, end of story.
So, there are no solutions, there is no effort you can do, no job you can do, and in fact the “jobs” thing is really funny: there has never been an era where jobs are so totally irrelevant and meaningless as today, exactly the moment (and this has been a long moment that started a few decades ago) that the Technological Economy was doing away with the entire concept of jobs, efforts that bring results, meritocracy, you have to deserve it, “hard work” and such by automation, optimization, agriculture mechanization, technology and transportation and electronics bringing forth huge economies of scale, huge amplifications of effects, huge excess productive capacity in all possible endeavors, all of a sudden the myth of “hard work” and “more effort”, and the “workaholics” myth, and the “more education”, the “skill sets” myth, in short the myth of meritocracy and inequality justifying your “job” and such became popular, became the dominant economic model, exactly when all of this was becoming no longer applicable, obsolete, no longer connected or relevant in any way to the economy.
In fact we need, less meritocracy, we need less “you have to deserve it” and more forced equality through free salaries and cheap rents in order to discharge the huge pent up, excess productive capacity manufacturing has worldwide, not the myth of “hard work” and meritocracy, we need the exact opposite.
I heard some banks in the EU and USA want to get rid of a few thousand workers, but those workers are not only an independent variable of what the banks do, they are a totally irrelevant variable, their work was worth zero whether they are in those banks or not, the entire idea of “work being necessary” to get “results”, effort brings results, in this service economy is a joke, those workers weren’t needed in the first place, they were there just as a place holder, just because the dominant economic forces have such a huge amount of cash that they truly don’t know what to do with it so they hire a few slobs just to get rid of some, just because, only to hose them when they feel like it, just for fun, because they are bored.
The effect the bank workers on result today is mostly the same effect that pebble down the street has on your TV set: zero, not related, not connected, irrelevant. The bank and so many other economic entities operate only according to power relationships, only according to some kinds of economic relationships, some kinds of monopoly, or status relationships, just because they are set up to make huge amounts of money automatically, as in automatic for the people, but especially automatic to those lucky enough to gain from some monopolistic type of relationship, like Apple selling like crazy because they are “fashionable” (not because those simple computers that are the iphones and ipads actually do anything new or better), same for Mercedes and BMW, and IBM and so forth and so on. They operate not because of the “effort” of their workers (which is, even when needed a dime a dozen like in the foxconn factories) but mostly because of a certain relationship that guarantees them a steady income just because, because they brainwashed most people through their marketing or because they have relationships amongst strong economic forces that “help each other” etc.
So then why did I write this block of text ? If nothing has any effect, if there is no investment that can give you any return anymore, then why write all of this garbage I wrote ? just because, because writing it or not is the equivalent of doing nothing, has no effect on anything, is useless, nay what I wrote is probably all false, or just to piss off some horny gal on this site (as I am ph*k denied) and such, just to be a creep, I creep myself out constantly, etc.
In fact, often by doing something you get mostly negative results, you lose instead of gaining, actually doing nothing is the most productive thing you can do, an economy with everything exactly dead is the richest possible.
Because the brain – mind can’t get over the fact that it must DO NOTHING, it is too used to, programmed too deeply to put “effort” in something with the hope of some “result” (but we make up all kinds of imaginary results with imaginary rituals and efforts anyways, we will make believe we gain and achieve even when there is no gain anyways (or gaining is arbitrarily defined, it can be assigned infinite just because, so I gained infinitely by writing this block of text, and such all fun and games)), but doing nothing or something is the same, it is all equivalent, the mind brain decides to disjoint them and make them opposites and make them define each other reciprocally, but none of it is true or false (other inventions) it is all a make believe world anyways, and doing nothing is actually doing everything, is achieving infinity constantly, or doing or not doing is equal, or undefined, or make up anything you want.WATCH TV, END OF STORY.

From:ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=176094
As in the world without this block of text: is it better or worse, did it go in any desired direction ? or what if the direction it should go is achieved without this text, or with a different text, and how many different texts can be written, and how can they be connected to sensations emotions pain/pleasure ? and so on, but especially was it built up already or is the text building down, is it destroying or constructing, and if you look at 2 items and name them A and B did the start path -> effort -> result go from A to B or from B to A ? and then how many As and Bs can be seen and invented, is everything a solution or result or start path or problem and the path itself could be C but substitute A with C and make it C to B using A as a path and so on. Then all is already constructed ? Then all is destroyed, but if you change the definition on the fly you get Instant Construction or Instant Destruction or just paths and efforts with no start or result, etc.
Is something a part of something else or disconnected ? what is the aggregate, the delimitation ?

Irrelevant Variables
In many theories, but especially economics and political economy there are many make believe causes and effects, many make believe irrelevant variables that are supposed to paint a pretty picture of an “economic situation” (aside from the fact that the entire idea of an economy and an economic situation is a huge abstraction, denotation, a made up abstraction that is just a bag of numbers (counters) measuring things as aggregated values like unemployment, orders, housing starts, sales, etc. that often and in most cases don’t mean anything at all and are all irrelevant variables to the lives of most people, so much so that most economy is simply the “psychological environment” of most people, it is mostly a “spiritual, psychological thing, the general MOOD OF A SOCIETY, THE GENERAL TRUST IN THE FUTURE A SOCIETY HAS, THE GENERAL EXPECTATIONS OF GAIN a society has, the general RESULT FROM EFFORT, THE BETTER FUTURE, THE IMPROVEMENT that people expect, have and make them feel “rich” better, improving, etc. that makes them spend money and invest, etc, that is why the economists are so obsessed with “ECONOMIC GROWTH” and “technological innovation” as these in the past uplifted the moods of people, things were getting better, improving, increasing, better cars, new devices, computers, cell phones, etc., but that one trick pony seems to be essentially dead now)) but are totally irrelevant variables such as orders from industry (but these seldom create any new jobs just ever more profit in the same old hands ever more), how much cash banks have (again, irrelevant number, banks have a huge amount of cash (distributed according to various holders, sometimes many sometimes few) but that cash doesn’t necessarily do anything for the economy, nay, it usually drains the economy of ever more cash as it needs to generate profit and robs the money from the money outside banks, also because banks don’t invest much in anything anymore knowing that there is no longer anything worth investing into, there is no longer any return on investment in anything, etc.) unemployment numbers (mostly false, always changing and never a real picture of how hard it is to find a good paying job, how long that good paying job can last, and what activity exactly that good paying job is supposed to perform (as in try to loan money to people that are broke so as to make a subprime loan stuff)), etc.
The economists only talk about these numbers but never say would could possibly improve things (but I can be wrong, who cares, everyone today is wrong as there are no solutions left and you might as well do nothing as I said) and namely: huge public private projects like High Speed Trains, Skyscrapers, Rockets to Mars, and many others, all collective endeavors that give a goal to millions of people that have no goal, that give them pride and ambition since they are working for a common goal, etc. and free salaries and cheap rents, etc. A project, a construction, something that is “building a future”, something real that you can touch with your hands, something that gives a sense of achievement, enough with fluff and fairy tales and huge profits to the few. All of this can be paid by the FED printing trillions of dollars (they are always printing trillions, we may have PEAK TREES soon, the trees will run out worldwide) and giving it out for real projects instead of simply handing it out into the hands of the super rich just for fun, just to see how easy it is to get away with it, just to see how it can fool everyone worldwide, etc.
Instead, puny odumbo talks about “innovation” and “small businesses” exactly the things that won’t create any new jobs and will exactly kill ever more jobs through innovation, etc.

Spelling correction:DO NOTHING
The hardest thing to do is nothing. But that is what should be done and what we all should do, simply do nothing, now you can be lazy freely, now you can finally be as lazy as you want without any guilt complexes, protestant work ethic and such, just give up, roll over and die, or do nothing at all, total void, absolutely nothing at all, you better like being bored, watch TV, write some crap on this blog and such but essentially try doing as much nothing as possible, try doing less and less of nothing, try being a total void, try no activity as hard and as much as possible, you can do it, man, go man go, do it. Why ? because there are NO SOLUTIONS to any problems, the fact that there is no cause and effect mechanism that can change the way things play out, they play out anyways, independent of anything you do, no one is in control really, no one, no matter how powerful you think they are (their power is always nearly zero although everyone thinks they have all of this power and even if they have all the cash in the world), there is no action and reaction that they or anyone at all can do that can drive the way things play out in any particular direction (aside from the fact that there are essentially 7 billion different directions, all contrasting, all opposite of each other, that anyone wants for the things to play out as).

And we wouldn’t have spent 3 weeks talking about the debt ceiling if not prompted to do so by the TV.
It has been pointed out that the debt ceiling has been raised 90 times in the past. How much time did you spend discussing the previous occurrences?
We do all dance to the TVs tune.

The entire idea of “DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT”, you must do something about it or do something to fix it or change it or manipulate it or whatever. But in almost all cases and all endeavors, in all situations, in practically every possible thing imaginable, you simply “CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT”“, you can’t do anything about anything, end of story, give up real fast.
Out of a trillion things you should “do something about” you can only do something about ONE, and even there just barely.
Give up real fast, man, you can do it, give up and suffer (or not ? enjoy instead, who cares), ever more, that is so cool, no more guilt complex protestant work ethic, no more “you didn’t work hard enough”, now you can answer, there is no return on investment, no gain from any effort, end of story, you are free to be as lazy as possible…Be really lazy, BE AS LAZY AS POSSIBLE!

Karl Marx came from a long line of Rabbis.
==
Karl Marx was paid agent of the Vatican/Bankers. As for the “long line of Rabbis”, they are probably the same long line of Bnei Brit Litvaks/Polacks the Vatican is financing right now
————————————-
When I read shit like this, I find it hard to tell if those writing it are serious….unless of course, you’ve been around here long enough to know that just about any form of blathering nonsense is possible. Reminds me of the movie “Deliverance”, but in this case both the banjo player and the guitarist are simple minded inbred imbiciles.

Dude writes:
“I do not hold my breath waiting for Kurzweilian “Singularity.” ”
I answer:
The singularity is already achieved with the very idea of the singularity, the mind modifies itself automatically and achieves the Instant Singularity when it realizes that it is a variable, an arbitrary variable that can be changed in any way possible, therefore decoding reality in any way possible therefore creating a new universe, new laws of physics, new sense organs, experiences etc. It has already been achieved, read all of nameta9’s posts on the Instant Singularity and others on the social sciences section of http://www.ilovephilosophy.com and all of old6699’s posts and all of spider9629’s on http://www.kunslter.com.
Just imagining it you create it, another modified mind fell from the SUN this is:
£JJEH%HHRJKG&%&&&&
Who knows what that is doing ? who knows how memory is connected to emotion, etc.

From:ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=176094
From:kunstler.com/blog/2011/08/weimar-meets-waterloo.html
Dude writes:
“I do not hold my breath waiting for Kurzweilian “Singularity.” ”
I answer:
The singularity is already achieved with the very idea of the singularity, the mind modifies itself automatically and achieves the Instant Singularity when it realizes that it is a variable, an arbitrary variable that can be changed in any way possible, therefore decoding reality in any way possible therefore creating a new universe, new laws of physics, new sense organs, experiences etc. It has already been achieved, read all of nameta9’s posts on the Instant Singularity and others on the social sciences section of http://www.ilovephilosophy.com and all of old6699’s posts and all of spider9629’s on http://www.kunstler.com.
Just imagining it you create it, another modified mind fell from the SUN this is:
£JJEH%HHRJKG&%&&&&
Who knows what that is doing ? who knows how memory is connected to emotion, etc.

Got to hand it to Obama. He outsmarted Boehner and McConnell at every turn…
————————————–
If the debt deal IS bullshit, then you are celebrating the fact that government policy is nothing but smoke and mirrors. The problem with that is, progressives must have a government that works, or there whole philosophy is deeply flawed, and right now, we have one that most definitely isn’t working.
Obama didn’t outsmart anyone, he’s pretty much exhausted whatever was left of the Democratic Party’s brand. Perceptions DO matter, and no clear headed individual believes Obama “won” in that battle. Once more he’s demonstated he doesn’t really stand up for the people, no matter how many of them want him to, and that’s no victory. Maybe he won’t pay in the next election, based on what the R’s have standing around, but the Democratic Party will pay, and for a long time, in all probability.
You have to stand for something….and you have to do what you say. Obama demonstrates neither trait.

Just imagining it you create it, another modified mind fell from the SUN this is:
£JJEH%HHRJKG&%&&&&
Who knows what that is doing ? who knows how memory is connected to emotion, etc.
———————————-
Who know if you stay up all night smoking meth, or if you are this confused naturally.
Actually, I find Kuntsler interesting, and I wouldn’t be surprised if SOME of what he says becomes reality. One thing is for sure, when it comes to predicting the future he has far better credentials than any of us, JHK in particular.

Interesting quotes, Den.
Clearly Obama has learned from Reagan. The speeches have nothing to do with the policies.
While Reagan mouthed criticisms of big guvment, he ran up the biggest deficits in US history. None of his followers noticed.
While Obama solemnly pledges in public to protect Social Security and Medicare, he’s making deals to destroy both programs, and more.
None of his followers notice.
It’s pretty amazing, actually. You can lie through your teeth, and 66% of the people will believe you.

Well, it looks like being editor of the Harvard Law Review means you end up being a more saavy negotiator, with chess-like strategy. The Republicans just got taken to the cleaners.
================
Soak is a hoot!
I went to the Rutgers pool yesterday to escape the heat and so I didn’t get around to reading yesterday’s NY Times Op Eds till this morning … right before reading the above referenced Soak post.
I’ll keep this short and let you look up the details if you are so disposed. On the left side of page A21 is an article by Ross Douthat titled The Diminished President and on the right side of that page Paul Krugman’s column titled The President Surrenders. These two regularly published Op Ed columnists are stalwarts of the Left.
P.S. It’s savvy.

Howdy Wage, Per your comment: “It’s pretty amazing, actually. You can lie through your teeth, and 66% of the people will believe you.”
Is this perchance because virtually all humans lie; therefore, leading to an inability for the majority to determine truth form fiction?
My last place of employ was with the US Army at APG, MD, my team leader was a fat, smoking, lying, asshole; which, I ascertained within a few conversations with him. What astounded me was that the vast majority of those whom had worked with him for years appeared to think he was an oracle. Fortunately for the taxpayers he died of heart problems when he was in his early 40’s thereby sparing said from supporting him into an aged infirmity.
SNAFU

Wage,
Clearly there’s something to that Orwell thing..You can hold up three fingers and tell someone that when you say that you’re only holding up two fingers, that’s what they’ll see…
This Cognitive dissonance is a gestalt problem. We all fill in the blanks as to what people are supposed to be about and don’t see the slight of hand.
Tarpley and Hudson got this guy (O) pegged and in many respects he’s more dangerous than the right winger who tell you exactly what they’re about, even if they’re dead wrong. At least you know where they stand and the Dems would act as the loyal opposition to their rampant privatization scheme.

Nice week’s work, as usual, JHK –
and thanks as always.
Here’s my favorite part –
“To put a finer point on it, industrialism (and all its digital offshoots) may not be a permanent feature of the human condition, but an anomalous congruence of some historical events that had a beginning, a middle, and an end._
-jhk-
I believe that there is mounting evidence that this idea is a possibility. And from my perspective, this is an unfortunate thing. Certainly there have been huge and nasty excesses of industrialism. But the huge bulk of humanity (even in whining and complaining US of A) lives better lives than they ever have – and perhaps, ever will again.
But we’ve got business leaders who think a fiscal year is a long period of time.
And political leaders who KNOW that a single election cycle will make or break them.
Things don’t look good, but it ain’t over ’till it’s over.
===================
On another note, I see that JHK or his tech guy went through and cleaned up a bunch of “trollage” from Monday. I read through and then gave up before commenting – just too much nastiness to want to wade in, for me.
But I see Spider is still here. Wonder what’s up with that.
And I had to get another new screenname handle. Wonder what’s up with that, too.
I’ll be pleasantly surprised if this even posts, at this point.

Beantown Bill
Re your post last week about the rich. Wasn’t it Fitzgerald that said the rich are different from you and I? And Hemingway allegedly replied, yes they have more money. Well yeah they have more money.
In my so called career I’ve had some exposure to exec compensation issues. And you know what, their level of materiality when it comes to their own pay is exactly one dollar.
Remember Martha Stewart messing herself up royally? Over what? An issue over a few tens of thousands when her income and wealth was measured in the hundreds of millions?
For these guys greed knows no bounds.

Actually, Hitler said that all humans tell little lies, but they would never be so bold as to impudently reverse the truth.
Therefore, they will believe in an impudent reversal of the truth.
I think he was right.

I didn’t read this blog yesterday, so I was kind of wondering why people were referring to posts that I didn’t see.
Now I know why. Fabian was deleted?
I have to say that that makes for a more enjoyable blog.
But I don’t know why they blocked you.

Hi Pro,
Last week we were talking about conspiracies and you brought up the JFK assasination.
To me that whole thing stunk of conspiracy, a de facto coup and a cover up. I just don’t buy this lone deranged gunman thing especially when the alleged perp himself got rubbed out. I think that the political establishment got the message: fall into line or there will be more killings. And so they did with that Warren Commission white wash.
So who dunnit? I think maybe a small, well connected group within the US military.
I think maybe that JFK lost his life over his inability to dislodge Castro from Cuba. And maybe other things. I just don’t see Kennedy, a Catholic and the son of an alleged bootlegger as being part of the inner core of American power. I have no proof but rather a just a gut feel that he wasn’t trusted, that he wasn’t “American” enough, that he wasn’t tough enough to deal effectively with the Communist threat. He was elected but so what? And so he had to go. I think that Krushchev lost his job over his handling and ultimately backing down during the Cuban missile crisis. So I think both leaders were casualties of the Cold War ie hate and fear on both sides of the Iron Curtain were the motivators.

Yeah, the banfabian cure was worse than the fabian disease.
As far as my banning – beats the hell out of me. When I lost progressorconserve as a handle I actually went through a brief (like 45 second) period of mourning, as I created the progress,conserve handle.
I didn’t post at all this past Monday – wish I had, just as an experiment. I’ve wondered if somebody could be eliminating the “high volume” posters – but soak posted far more than I did last week – and he’s still here.
If I were a newcomer to this discussion thread I’d probably bail out on CFN over Spiders lengthy and repetitive posts. And JHK just lets Spider keep going and going. I don’t really care a whole lot, anymore – but I am very curious about all of this.
And it’s not like I use an abundance of n*sty l*nguage, eith*er. 😉
And my politics is more in line with most of JHK’s positions than is the politics of either Vlad or soak – our CFN polar opposites.
I’m assuming my banning was another electronic glitch – but I’m starting to get a little paranoid about it.
It’s altogether. weird.

Actually, yes, I can sharpen a saw blade! 🙂
And I was just out having a meeting with 6 of my neighbors in the middle of our road discussing putting in a group net-meter wind tower for the neighborhood while they are still being manufactured, and collectively starting up bee keeping. We’ve been working towards collective neighborhood gardening now for a while, slowly by fits and starts.
I was kinda hoping they wouldn’t pass the bill, just to call their bluffs and let us all actually see something closer to what’s really going on. It’s all been smoke and mirrors since we came off the gold standard anyway…
Keep slinging it JHK.

Credulity is built into the human genome, as it is advantageous to survival.
Imagine this scenario. Momma cave lady has two sons, Bob and Andy. Bob believes everything she tells him. Andy doesn’t believe a word of anything she says and wants to figure out things for himself.
One day, Momma says, “Kids, don’t go down to the river, because there are gigantic crocodiles that will eat you.”
Bob says, “Okay, Mommy,” and continues chipping at his rock.
Andy says, “I don’t believe you. I’m going to see for myself.” He takes off for the river bank and is never heard from again.
Thus curiosity killed the cave man.

HARD WORK ?
Whatever happened to HARD WORK ? What happened to the idea of more work means more money, that linearity, more effort will bring more money, more work, more workers means making more money ? Guess what ? it is no longer operating (if it ever was) otherwise how can you explain that corporations have never made so much money as today by firing millions of workers worldwide ? In fact the banks say that they have to hose a few thousand workers, just because, but they are already making loads of money, but they hose workers to make “even more”. There goes down the drain the idea of more workers and more work bringing in more money, actually if anything, it is the reverse, the fewer the workers the more money, not the linearity we love to imagine is always operating more A means more B, in this case more work (which means more effort, more activity) should bring more money: nothing further from the truth, this fairy tale of work corresponding to money has never been true, money has always been a proxy for status relationships, power relationships and fewer workers mean more money if anything. Then again it assumes that the bank workers (or workers in any of the productive endeavors that they have been firing for years just to have a laugh) have no “rare skill”, nothing really “special” about them, all of those “skill sets” and “college education” and courses, masters, semesters, training they had all of a sudden is worth A BIG FAT ZERO. Now how is that possible ? Whatever happened to meritocracy, the skill set, the effort and all the other boatload of lies they have been telling everyone for years ? All false ? Uh oh, I guess they fooled us all, what a laugh, oh what fun, and especially what fun for all of those people spending thousands of dollars for college education or whatever expecting to get a “return on investment”.
But the service economy, and more specifically the innovation, high tech sectors are the kings of inequality, are the kings that really demonstrate that these sectors not only don’t create jobs (but actually kill them BIG TIME), but that they need workers like a hole in the head: they need only very top notch specific, very skilled workers in very specific specialized areas, that is all, everyone else is useless, this is the nature of high tech, it is so specialized, so specific and requires often such high skill levels, knowledge etc. that only very few people really cut it and are “worth something” to the corporations and only because they can’t do without (this also correlates very nicely with the growing economic inequality worldwide, in this case a growing knowledge inequality, those who know it all and have real specific talents and those who are just normal slobs, even if quite talented and with physics or engineering degrees and all, but really not part of that truly elite club ofsuperstar scientist and technicians (I am thinking Integrated Circuits and processes specialists, certain algorithm and mathematics specialists, certain material sciences specialists, network and router techs and such). No law of more workers means more results operating here either, more effort brings more results, no way jose’, this is non linear at the fullest, the more specific – quirky, lucky chance idea or discovery or invention (often associated with very little work or effort) the more money you can make, like the Apple IPAD.
Just like the linearity of less taxes and more cuts will “generate jobs”, will “do good for the economy”. Now how on earth is this possible ? (but knowing how totally random and without any possible logic or rules economy and all things social or Man Based is, it may even work, just for fun, just for the kicks of it), if anything, more cuts, less taxes, means somewhere down the line less money flowing around one way or another which always translates into firing workers, any and all, no matter what they do (or in the best case, cutting their salary or making them work part time). But this thing of cutting expenses, firing, cutting taxes really means people are all slobs, people cost “too much”, get rid of people and workers, workers are all such a huge pile of crap. This is essentially what it really means. Whatever happened to the idea that “people are a resource” ? That seems to have disappeared also (people are always a turd and expense end of story, economists please stop lying about people being a resource or talent wasted and such).

On the Technological Singularity thing: it has already been achieved, it is a metaphysical state of affairs, the idea of the singularity generates it, creates it, it is no longer based on reality, science, true or false, real or fake, it is proudly LIE BASED, it accepts all contradictions and lies since by changing the brain, you completely change the reference system that is measuring and rendering all real, it is changing the laws of physics and the universe since it breaks all the rules. It no longer needs to touch things or the arbitrary pain/plesure circuits to confirm reality, it becomes a purely abstract, symbol and denotation entity, a metaphysical machine with trillions of new relationships, new pain/pleasure types of circuits but without the sensations we think we know (they are invisible hence more real) and so forth, invent anything you want it is real and all.
And then what is that new modified mind brain mental contraption that fell from the SUN and Cindy found in her backyard ? It is a new design of a mind, a new block diagram full of wild symbols and signals, crazy connections, wild chemicals, the crazier the better, it is exploded and one at the same time who knows:
W£UUUR//%&%/R//RRRRYYYR
this is the block diagram of this new mind, it has the square root of existence connected to zero mixed with disjoint set elements that are evaporating though unknown dimensional entities, etc.

With regards to “The Radical Loser” from:ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=176095
“This is an understatement. For what we are dealing with here is not annoyance, but murderous rage. What the loser is obsessed with is a comparison that never works in his favour. Since the desire for recognition knows no limits, the pain threshold inevitably sinks and the affronts become more and more unbearable. The irritability of the loser increases with every improvement that he notices in the lot of others. The yardstick is never those who are worse off than himself. In his eyes, it is not they who are constantly being insulted, humbled and humiliated, but only ever him, the radical loser.”
The article goes on to express the view that the pissed off loser (like me) wants to kill himself and everyone and so on.
Wow, it sounds like me! Wow, how I identify with this, wow, now I know why I want to kill everything and everyone including myself, why I hate nature’s guts, (carbon atoms must be killed as they are the mark of the beast) why I am hysterical and raging with hate and envy and jealousy and all towards anyone who has anything, why I want to destroy and nuke everything, wow, I finally found an explanation of myself.
On another note, this block of text demonstrates that we can go on forever analyzing and discovering all the new truths and relationships, it never ends, if it is all so true, then why doesn’t the new blocks of text ever end ? Why can we keep on writing this crap forever, always new crap ? because it is not true, all studies and analysis and blocks of text, no matter how elaborate are an invention of the mind, reality is always a pure invention, we invent a reality, analyze it and invent another one on top of that previous one making believe that is is true.
Make believe you are the Instant Singularity, you really become it, because the Instant Singularity thrives on falsity and lies and converts it into truth…
On another note, kill democracy, kill the conflicts people have over everything, end conflicts, all of them, especially all the interdictions the greens put forward against technology and all with an IRON CLAD COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP finally showing who the boss is by building trillions of Skyscrapers, Rockets to Mars, Killing Nature, Huge public private collective projects, High Speed Trains and such, free salaries and cheap rents.

Hey Toots,
Ford went south through the round $12 number like it wasn’t even there. Way to go. You’ve managed to lose about 10% on that trade in 3 weeks. Pure genius. Maybe it’s time to average down again at a lower “price point.” Bwa ha ha ha.

Wage: “Now I know why. Fabian was deleted?”
OMG, you’re right! And so much of my own deathless prose has gone with him, because replies to his posts have been deleted as well. Serves me right for playing to a blatant troll.
Of course, I suppose all he needs is another disposable e-mail address and sufficient wit to invent another pseud. We can always hope.

When I read shit like this, I find it hard to tell if those writing it are serious….unless of course, you’ve been around here long enough to know that just about any form of blathering nonsense is possible. Reminds me of the movie “Deliverance”,
==
Do the research, come back and apologize, and I promise not to sodomize your sorry ass and make you squeal like a pig. Because if you would have done the research, you would have known that what I said is true. You’re so predisposed to the upside down propaganda that they feed you, you instinctively dismissed what I said as absurd. It’s called emotional capture.
DO THE RESEARCH !!

Good thing pro football signed a new agreement with the players so we can look forward to another season to distract us from reality.
———————————
If you are in the percentage of the population which finds “corporate ball” all that exciting.

Karl Marx was paid agent of the Vatican/Bankers. As for the “long line of Rabbis”, they are probably the same long line of Bnei Brit Litvaks/Polacks the Vatican is financing right now
———————————-
Sorry, I went back and read it again, and you’re just fucking stupid….and a cheese dick.

“Do the research”
“if you would have done the research”
“DO THE RESEARCH !!”
You’re saying you want us to do something? What might that be?
Dude, I am not privy to this new information that has come to light.

Are you JHK or JFK? What do the H and the F stand for? Or are these two people actually one with the initials H.F?
As Charles Dexter Ward asked, Cannot a man be dual now and again?
But if a man becomes two, then that makes three including his “real” self.

—About the CFN Troll—
Hi, all.
This is the deal in a nutshell, for the newbs.
There is a person who posts on this blog quite frequently using numerous different accounts.
Just between Monday and Tuesday of this week (!) they have included:
fabian
banfabian
auntie soake
xhalor
And probably others.
This person is (as far as I can tell) a professional TROLL with no life and no job. They have had MANY accounts in the past on this blog, starting with oneEyeOpen many years ago.
The “pissant” as he has been appropriately nicknamed, does not care about your ideas, your comments, or your point of view. If you disagree with it, you are inevitably dubbed a “fucktard” or “moron.”
This trolling behavior seems to me like a child who wants the sandbox all to himself. So he poops in it. And he starts throwing poop at the other kids in the sandbox, many of whom promptly go play someplace else.
Well, the pissant has pooped in the sandbox too many times, and other kids want to play, too. And, frankly, it stinks.
SO, I have apprised JHK of the situation here in the comments section, and he is ON IT. If you send him a quick email with the pissant’s new account information once he starts posting again, JHK will take a look at the posts, remove them, and ban him. I intend to do this when I spot them.
Trust me, all this person wants to do is get a rise out of you and make some momma jokes, and, at this point, the pissant has been banned probably about 15 times from this blog.
Please ignore them (which I intend to do from now on) and report flagrant abuse like multiple posting of trolls and flames from different accounts.
This has been a Clusterfuck Service Announcement from your host, Turkle. Carry on.

Turkle,
I’d never seen that Icke guy before,….nice. I especially like the part about “mother loses custody battle to insane evil child killer”. Did he leave that off his resume, or was she just a REALLY bad mother?
Anyway, thanks for the laughs, and I don’t even want to know if this guy is serious or not.

Construction or Conflict ?
Notice how evolved and perfected technological products are: cars, jets, computers, etc. When there is a clear cut goal to reach and a clear path to reach it like technological constructions and products, manufacturing endeavors, constructing things, building things, a clear goal, etc. then Man can do miracles, it is under control, it can be achieved and is achieved very well (it also usually coincides with a closed product and not a process, etc. a kind of private like product a car versus a law or society problems etc), instead when politics, society, laws, morality, conflicts, that mega huge turd called DEMOCRACY (as in fight over everything and never achieve anything because no one is in control, no one dictates exactly what must be done, end of story) nothing works, everything breaks down, everything becomes a turd.
Thanks to environmentalists, greens, nature lovers, morality, protecting this and that, being good to this and that, well who gives two c*cks and a d*ck ? We need to force our wills, build skyscrapers and rockets,end of story.
Like the conflicts going on in Syria, now why are they all fighting each other ? because no one wanted to give all those people the basics that they need, cheap rents, a free salary to live, running water and such, end of story. Instead give the basics to all and from there on construct a future, build things, go forward, no more different opinions and democratic process blocking everytihng, no more fighting over everything, no more environmentalists saying NO to all endeavors and constructions and such.

Like usual, old69 is just cut and pasting irrelevant crap from some stupid iphilosophy blog, which is filled with nonsensical techno-optimist babble that isn’t worth reading.
I’m currently lobbying that he be banned.

Yes you did imply that it never existed. You are such a Liar that you can’t even keep it all straight. Don’t feel bad – all modern Marxist Liberals are Liars just like you.
There’s was no need for their continued publication – after all, they won. Now their bizarre, hateful message of White Non-Existence (cognitive terrorism) is now the official stance of the whole Western World.

Vlad, I’m sincerely interested how anyone with whom you disagree is automatically the 2nd coming of Karl Marx.
Is it all part of the vast sinister Communist/Liberal Conspiracy aimed at making fun of dumb hicks on internet blogs?

Turk, just to fill you in and so you don’t make (even more) a fool out of yourself – Race Traitor Magazine is now real. It has come down from Commissar Dale. And remember, it was always real and will continue to always have been real until further notice. Truth is a function of expediency – whose? The Party’s of course! We ALL have noticed your pliancy in this regard Comrade, and your future is bright indeed.
Hail Sargon!

Turkle, I’m glad you’re on to this. I noticed a whole bunch of weird stuff going on with all these postings. At first I thought that Soak might have been using ‘Auntie Soak’ as a funny alter ego screen name. But, then I started seeing a whole bunch of profanity used by all these so-called individuals. It really looks like we are dealing with the same person. I don’t mind folks saying critical things to or about me (even mean things) but I really want to know who I’m dealing with. Otherwise, I’m just wasting my time replying to them. I’m certain that Vlad is not using other screen names. He used to go by another name but that was a long time ago. My bet would be that whoever is posting as ‘Fabian’ is the culprit.

I’m going to post this now and then go away. I will not make any comments about these statements until later. Instead, I will let other JHK readers make their own comments and discuss.
Listed below are several of the arguments that have been used by misguided people to try and justify illegal immigration. Next to each is the reason why that argument has no merit.
1) They are an economic necessity – Not true. The idea that a bunch of desperately poor, uneducated, unskilled, non-English speaking foreigners are an economic necessity is ludicrous. In fact, when you compare cost vs. benefit, it is obvious that they are not only NOT a necessity, they are not even an asset. Rather, they are a liability and a huge one at that.
2) They do work Americans won’t do – Not true. They do work Americans won’t do for $7 an hour (especially if Americans can collect welfare and unemployment instead). Of course, if you got rid of the illegals, the jobs wouldn’t pay $7 an hour. The people who wanted the work done would have to pay a wage that was attractive enough to get Americans to do the work. And it might even be enough to get Americans off the unemployment and welfare dole and back into the taxpaying workforce!
3) We benefit from all that “cheap” labor – This is nonsense. The only people who benefit from the cheap labor are the unscrupulous people who hire illegal immigrants. Taxpayers are left holding the bag. Ultimately, it is they who must pay to support all the Americans who have been put out of work by illegals and must also provide billions of dollars in services and benefits to the illegals themselves.
4) They are just trying to make better lives – Aren’t we all? The difference is that most of us understand that we DO NOT have a right to acquire by illegal means those things that we find difficult to acquire by legal means. And we certainly don’t have the right to do it in a foreign country.
5) It is impossible to round up and deport the illegals – We don’t have to. All we have to do is remove the incentives that brought them here in the first place. No jobs. No housing. No taxpayer financed services or benefits (including education). Once we remove the incentives that brought them here, they will leave on their own.
6) Immigration control is racist / xenophobic – This is just another play of the race card by people who have no other cards to play. Immigration control is the world-wide status quo. There is nothing racist about it. Furthermore, the USA welcomes LEGAL immigrants of all races and ethnicities from all over the world who have gone through the legal immigration process. This is not just a bad argument, it is an attempt to create racial hatred and division.
7) We are a nation of immigrants – This is the “BIG LIE”. The vast majority of Americans are native-born. I am not an immigrant. Nor were my parents. Nor were my grandparents. We are a nation that has, historically, allowed and even encouraged LEGAL immigration. And we continue to do so. The issue at hand is illegal immigration, which has nothing to do with legal immigration.
8) They are people. We must treat them humanely – Yes & yes. But lets not pretend like they are victims who were dragged here kicking and screaming against their will. Nothing could be further from the truth. They came of their own free will and for their own benefit and they broke the law to do it. People should not be rewarded for breaking laws and committing crimes. Sending them home is the right thing to do. There is nothing “draconian” or “mean-spirited” about it.
9) It is wrong to break up families- Yes. Unfortunately, families are often broken up by criminal activity. If you don’t believe it, just drop by any prison or jail on visiting day. We can’t keep families together if some family members choose to participate in criminal activity.
10) They work & contribute to our society – So do I. And if I break the law and commit crimes, I can expect to pay a penalty of some kind. Anything from a small fine to the death penalty. I do not receive a reward. Why should we treat foreign criminals better than our own citizens?

Could not agree with you more. Every point you make is well taken. The U.S. encouraged immigration when it needed the labor. It doesn’t anymore. So stop it. Slow it down. Do it. I know plenty of people who will work for minimum wage if they can only get a job. Americans won’t do the work? Bullshit! See how fast Congress weans the public off of Welfare, Social Security, Unemployment, Foodstamps. We’ll see how slow these Americans are to get work and food on the freaking table.

Oh, and please before anyone hits me up for being a conservative who wants to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, etc., save your breath. I rely on some of these programs. My whole point is to stop the immigration. To make Vlad happy, I’ll include Swedes, Hungarians, Poles, Irish, whatever! Besides, anyone in their right minds from these countries would be jumping out of the proverbia frying pan and into the pan.
And please don’t point out to me that my own folks were starving Irish immigrating in 1840. The Civil War was about to end and they needed new “nigger” labor.
I’m sorry to have used such harsh terms. The doctor said I could cut way back on my meds. I’m starting to awaken. Things are worse than when I’d left. Thanks for all the well wishes!

Well how much of a Catholic could he be if he had affairs with many women? He’s what we call a “Kennedy Catholic”.
Not sure you’re right about that: William F Buckley was a “Catholic” and also a member of Skull and Bones, the very heart of the WASP power stucture. Now the Church forbids membership in secret socieities so he wasn’t a real Catholic either.
Tony Blair became a Catholic as soon as he stepped down as Prime Minister – one of his last acts was to secure the funding of abortion. A “Blair Catholic”. Apparently Blair needs a forum in which to wreak mayhem.
Why does the Church tolerate this? They have been infiltrated at the highest levels.

I live on one of top floors of a large, high-rise apartment building in Hong Kong. The building management is justifiably concerned about objects inadvertantly falling off the building which because of the height might fall and hurt someone below. This seems to be such a problem in Hong Kong that dropping anything off of a building in Hong Kong is a “strict liability offense”. In other words, intent is irrelevant. If you do it, you’re guilty.
In any case, it seems that a sociopath has moved into my apartment building. According to a notice posted in the elevator, it seems that someone likes to throw “fast food” out of their apartment window. They don’t even bother to throw it in the trash. They just hurl it out the window, like some ancient pueblo indian. Their anti-social contempt for humanity is so great that they rain french fries, half-eaten burgers, grease, salt and fat onto the faceless masses below, like some god in the heavens.
Think about it….
Resource constraint leads to economic collapse, which, in turn, leads to sociopathic behavior. The world goes nuts. Living in The End Times….

Their anti-social contempt for humanity is so great that they rain french fries, half-eaten burgers, grease, salt and fat onto the faceless masses below, like some god in the heavens.
Think about it….
——————————
Great, yet another way to die from fast food, really fast food.

Yes you did imply that it never existed. You are such a Liar that you can’t even keep it all straight
——————————-
O.K. Vladdie, let’s test your research skills, please post the quote where I said RTM didn’t exist.

The point is not whether it is true, the point is, it doesn’t matter, cheese dick. Get it.
==
Whatever.
—————————–
Sorry to be so rude. What I should have said is; we already have received our chesse dick allocation this year from chesse dick central, so perhaps you could go back to headquarters and get reassigned. I understand they have a vacancy over at blaringvacuumhead.com. Best of luck to you.

While you do demonstrate some chessedick tendencies, and could be hiding the truth about your real persona on this board, I have to say in one respect I agree with you.
In recent years immigration was allowed to occur at levels much higher than in the past, and assimilation has been strained as such, so in that respect I believe your argument has merit.

Sure – 5:08 in response to Turk’s 5:04. Total mockery. It’s SO much easier for you to slander people than to google. It’s ALWAYS your first response. You should be ashamed – but you wont be since there’s not enough “you” to feel such a thing. All Super Ego and Id.

So I just came in from walking my dogs about a mile. The insects are unbelievable in the woods now. . From the crickets count and my watch they are right on target.I don’t know how they do it but the little six-legged sumbitch’s are right on the money. They will still be singin’ in the trees when we are all gone.entomology.unl.edu/k12/crickets/temperature.htm

Pucker,
People have been pissing in public swimming pools and throwing rocks from interstate highway bridges for as long as I can remember. In fact, as a kid a friend and I decided it would be a fun idea to tee up some golf balls into some incoming traffic. Fortunately, no one was hit, but some enraged Hoss chased us down and nearly beat the living shit out of us with a nine iron. We never did it again.

It seems the vast majority of posters here wether progressive or conservative favor an end to more immigration at this time. I would bet a nation wide poll would get the same results. when I first started posting I thought I was the only one on this blog that leaned this way besides Vlad. From what I have seen south of the Rio Bravo and from overseas video, you can’t blame people from wanting to come here. The nation of immigrants argument is a dead paradigm in the peak everything world. The reason for that is we are at peak people if the country values quality of life.

It’s like Avatar, only we never notice the beauty and wonder around us. So we destroy it for profit and personal gratification. Yea, I’m on board widdat! Sheet, I got me an SUV! I’m a gonna go on don to mackdonalds and get me a fry an’ a mac! Afta I be stoppin’ by da welfare ossif an all. Ok, flame me now.

“Listed below are several of the arguments that have been used by misguided people to try and justify illegal immigration. Next to each is the reason why that argument has no merit.”
-dolanW-
Nice list of arguments. The only thing that I would suggest adding is that many of the same arguments can be made against LEGAL immigration, also.
Policy makers and citizens of the US need to have an honest conversation about where the upper limits of growth for the US should be set. At some point, the country must be declared full.
If replacements for fossil fuels in agriculture and electricity production are not forthcoming –
then that point was reached long ago, and at a much lower population number than we have here today.
There are some excellent organizations dedicated to reduction of immigration into the US. I suggest joining one or more of them.
=========
On another note – soak must have been banned along with fabian.
Otherwise he would be having a conniption fit by now, about how desirable legal and illegal immigrants and open borders are.

I have a friend who came here from Poland about 35 years ago or so, and she confirms what you say Miss Myrtle May.
Yeah I wish I could do that legal Pot thing, I live in CA so could, as I have major disc pain, but the stuff makes me too self concious, and well paranoid.
So I have been taking too many meds recently also and I think it shows in my posts.
Makes me less positive, as I usually am.
Take it Easy !
🙂

“It’s SO much easier for you to slander people than to google. It’s ALWAYS your first response.”
Is this is a joke? When was the last time you didn’t call me a Marxist Liberal at least once in the week’s comments?
In fact, you constantly suggest that anyone who disagrees with you here is some kind of raging red Communist infiltrator. You anointed dale, of all people, as some kind of liberal/communist/socialist kingpin, and I’m betting he has about 10 times your net worth and has run his own businesses. I think he’s a landlord, from what I recall, or he was. Some goddam arch-Marxist that is.
And then you’ve got the temerity to turn around and say that others are slandering you after you go after them like a latter day Joe McCarthy.
Get real, whack job! You’re out there flapping.

Weimar met Waterloo marching to Pretoria!
The United States can’t honestly be seen becoming more and more like South Africa under apartheid. Just because poor people and people of color are being disenfranchised from voting (let’s hear it from Scott Walker!), just because right-wingers are moving to restrict abortion and sex education, just because so many blacks live in squalid, dysfunctional towns and cities and are trapped in menial jobs, just because there’s an ongoing attack on homosexuals, just because a few justices of the peace are refusing to marry interracial couples, just because the Republican party is laying the groundwork to be in control of the federal government for decades once they win back the Presidency and the Senate, just because there will be few if any social services in this country in the near future, just because other countries will divest from American interests if the debt ceiling isn’t raised in time, just because white people will someday be outnumbered by everyone else but will still control everything, that doesn’t mean we’re headed to a period of a legally sanctioned social arrangement in which we’re separate but . . . unequal.
From my blog (www.stevenmaginnis.blogspot.com), July 27, 2011.

In the unpredictable realm of dreams I watched my grandmother and mother discuss the roses in bloom. I looked where they looked, with giant pedals of every imaginable color filling the sky. Tears collected in the dimple lakes of my spirit.
Till the garden – oh yeah. But how to till the mind and spirit, where the amazing and spontaneous moment yields beauty, awe, and mystery for the remainder of one’s life? I certainly don’t know, meditation perhaps, but I vividly recall at least three or four dreams for years now and maybe an idea or two. One of those ideas is that the demon flashing in the dark house of worship needs to be met with the overwhelming force of the light switch – like destroying like. No appeasing or yielding, just Michael dropping the sword.

It’s a real humdinger of a red-white-and-blue clusterfuck sandwich, isn’t it? My friend, you have come to the right place.
BTW, that’s one hell of a run-on sentence. Have you thought about inserting some periods in there?

and I’m betting he has about 10 times your net worth and has run his own businesses. I think he’s a landlord, from what I recall, or he was. Some goddam arch-Marxist that is.
==
You can’t be that ignorant? Can you? Marx himself lived a life of an English bourgeoisie. Most modern day Marxists are wealthy middle class and upper class. That’s because the only difference between Marxism and Fascism is the “colors” of the government mafia.
Anyway, I think most people are cultural Marxists. It’s almost in the air we breath. I’m a cultural Marxists. And Marx was quite correct in his observations regards the spiritual alienation that follows capitalism. Where Marx went wrong is in his prescription. Same as Anders Breivik. Correct about the problem, wrong about the solution.

Thanks Cash
xoxoxoxoxox
You’re lucky you were offline, cuz fabian was The Worst Poster Ever. Really Rude and Crude and no class whatsoever. Actually I wish you would have been around to kick his ass !
I am around, just won’t be posting so much drama stuff. I went off the deep end recently, and wasn’t too clear headed.
I’m good now, well headed in the right direction anyway.
LOL

I actually DO notice the Beauty and Wonder around.
Well I moved to a Beautiful Area years ago for that reason. But I know what you mean.
Most people are rushing around like crazy.
Driving themselves crazy.
get it ? Driving. I made a point to set up my life so I didn’t have to commute to work, and never have more than 20 miles.
And almost never more than 5. Waste of time and too much stress for me.
I have Never eaten a burger from Mac D’s ! I should be famous for that alone ! I had a Foster Freeze burger once. way back. I like burgers homemade. Barbque is the best. Yummy. I am hungry haven’t eatin dinner yet, it’s 10pm. got stuck on here !

THANK YOU for helping get rid of fabian etc.
Worst of the worst.
I almost emailed JHK but had to do something that made my computer not protected to do it, and I know little to nothing about computers, so I didn’t do it.
Almost snail mailed him.
Glad you spoke up. I think sj mom went away for awhile cuz of him. He was COMPLETELY out of line on that one. I think that was him.
I am tired.
there were a couple of JERKS.
Thanks again. and good night to all my pals.

Hey Dolan- Great post on the subject of illegal immigration. And as Progress2Conserve points out, it equally applies to the issue of legal immigration…sorry Soak, but your magnanimous
support for ‘open borders’ is totally insane. The vast majority of Americans, left, right and center, know this to be case. So why does it continue?
In my experience in the building trades, it seems that the hard assed “Bossman” types who bring in the illegals-you know, the guys who actually give them jobs-landscaping,mowing, pounding nails, humping wheelbarrows around ect. these guys are all , without exception, politically conservative. Uber-conservative. They hate anybody (particularly the damn Gubmint!) that tries to tell them how they should run their business – you know,stupid things like the minimum wage, workplace safety laws, environmental protection laws, building codes ect.
That’s why I find it comical that the whole illegal immigration mess seems to be such a hot button issue for conservatives, when (from what I have actually seen) it is always always always conservative contractors and landscapers who are handing out the jobs and cash to the illegals. Conservatives both hate illegal immigrants as well as the government that should be enforcing our labor and immigration laws. You know the jazz- “Tell the government to keep its damn dirty hands off of our small businesses!” And so the illegal immigration continues unabated.
Seems a little contradictory to me…

As in the relation between information inputs and sequence of symbols and sensory inputs and emotional responses and pain/pleasure responses and memory triggers and such. How to connect these, how many variations, elaborations are possible ? And what comes first the emotional responses create the informational symbols or is it the informational symbols create the emotional responses and such ?
As in not only can’t the pissed off loser match up to anyone or anything, but anything anyone does is another slap in the face another punch in the face of the pissed off loser, any gain, even if imagined, even if not real or existent is automatically seen as another huge loss, as a punishment for the pissed off loser, even just the fact that a person is not killing themselves or raging with hate but just normal and indifferent is interpreted by the pissed off loser as that person having infinitely more than the loser, so the loser is ever more pissed off, ever more jealous, raging with hate, pent up devastating hate and rage and hysterically insane with the desire to punish and get even and such.
And why do certain people connect well between each other but the pissed off loser can’t connect with anyone ? why does 2 or more people communicate and connect and have fun (not to even mention sex which is another huge can of worms killing and crushing the pissed off loser) and the pissed off loser is alone in his rage and hate and all ? why is he disconnected ? just because, because that is the hand of cards god dealt him, because he is simply more of a turd than your normal slob, end of story. Hence, may the pissed off loser lose ever more, suffer ever more and punish himself ever more, he will be ok, god is awaiting him to give him infinite pain in hell when he dies, so he better appreciate this huge suffering he gets on earth as he still hasn’t seen anything yet. Kill all hope, kill all optimism, that is the way to go.
As in the change an entity undergoes defines the entity, how it interacts and changes according to other elements and events and items touching and colliding with it. Each new interaction defines the element in a completely new way, so each new interaction is a completely new creation, a new universe, a new laws of physics and such. As how a person or thought path interacts with a new information or situation, or how a group of people interact to a new situation and such. The group or person or whatever is defined as A, but no one would have ever imagined that it could become B from certain interactions and stimulations and such. A dormant item, steady for years then all of a sudden becomes something totally unrelated, that even the item itself would never had imagined it could become, or it was, or was it ever anything but only always instantaneous information interactions and relationships that can never been known, than can always be a completely new surprise, never be able to be predicted, as the equation that pops up was not contained within its inital set ? The change constantly redefines what the element was and constantly redefines and reinvents the entire past and meaning and existence of what the element was and is and will be.
On the Instant Singularity, since every new configuration of Mass Energy designed to respond to inputs and associated to memories, a kind of consciousness or whatever (no matter how far out, no matter how many completely new elements and items and such) then collides with any other Mass Energy configuration (which could be another mind, or a mind within another mind, an infinite recursion of minds containing other minds and such), then the experience it undergoes is equivalent to a new universe, a new set of laws of physics, an new big bang, a new creation every time, so trillions of new laws of physics, new universes, new big bangs for very picoseond of interaction the modified, wild, crazy and saturated with wild symbols and wild signals mind undergoes with other chunks of matter, and the delimitation of the mind, is it just a small atom or a molecule or an entire planet, a planet sized mind interacting with a single electron and such.
You can do it man, invent it all, lie to yourself, make it all up, the Instant Singularity is the invention of itself, it invents its own existence.
Beware when the economists and politicians talk about “solutions” for the “economy”, they always talk in sweeping, large scale ideas and concepts that essentially remain undefined, vague, mostly fake and made up, so that they can mean everything and nothing, like “innovation”, “economic growth”, “skills”, “competition” “productivity” and such: most of these concepts are so vague and fluffy, so undefined that they can mean and be and represent anything at all, but mostly mean, that they “have no solution, but make up a lot of fancy words to say nothing and make it seem as if they have solutions (to problems that have no solutions) and they know what they are talking about”.

Hey give us back the troll pissant, he was fun! Please don’t let this site become boring, he made it exciting and entertaining, I had a good lot of laughs from it, come on, don’t be a party popper…
dickweed…

Man, I am sure glad Congress kicked that can down the road again – now I can get back to watching “Wipeout” and eating my cheese doodles. Like 99% of the rest of America. (eyes glazing over, going to sleep now – ………..zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz)

We invent new problems with the hope that maybe we can win in solving them, since we can’t solve the old problems. So we constantly invent new endeavors, situations, problems (and subtly try to make them easy to solve, or make believe they are hard, but then solve them), so in that case we win, we won, etc. constant changing problems, create them until you qualify to solve them, the contents of the problems is irrelevant.
On immigration:
1) Up until a few hundred years ago, any population that tried to go into the territory of any other would have been considered an “invasion” an act of “war”, hence those invading would have to fight it out, and would probably lose and be beaten, end of story. They would consider our “moralistic mentality” of “feeling for others”, accepting others (as they run from their poverty and such) completely absurd and irrational, they knew people are always enemies, are always confrontations, are always out to get you, they knew that there was always resource contention and fight, they didn’t have any doubt: shoot them and kill them end of story.
2) The only reason people move around is because they are denied the basics in their own country, nay, the basics are mostly denied to everyone in all countries just because, because of an old fashioned idiotic ideology and mentality where “you have to deserve it” and such nonsense: in all truth the Technological Economy has done away with the “resource scarcity” and “resource contentions” that we have always had, now everything could be given to everyone virtually for free. But people “love to hate and fight” more than anything else, love to deny others what they need (and in the meanwhile always talk about the poor thid world and such crap), but the basics could easily be given to anyone almost for free since they are simply a small decent hosuing unit (very easy to build and construct and there are 15 million empty homes in the USA and 20 million empty homes in Europe from Lisbon to Moscow), running water, a small basic free salary to eat, END OF STORY.
Not hard at all to achieve, could be done in a jiffy, but people are turds, they are all brainwashed on overpopulation, they mostly have the urge to beat the living daylights out of everyone else, they love violence and war, they want to kill, they want to fire workers, layoff workers, punish and all kinds of things. People love to see others lose, end of story.

ph*trd says:
“What other handles does this old69 character use on here?”
turkle
fabian
progress,conserve
cash
JHK himself
Bustin J
.
.
.
and many others.
Spelling error correction:
2) The only reason people move around is because they are denied the basics in their own country, nay, the basics are mostly denied to everyone in all countries just because, because of an old fashioned idiotic ideology and mentality where “you have to deserve it” and such nonsense: in all truth the Technological Economy has done away with the “resource scarcity” and “resource contentions” that we have always had, now everything could be given to everyone virtually for free. But people “love to hate and fight” more than anything else, love to deny others what they need (and in the meanwhile always talk about the poor third world and such crap), but the basics could easily be given to anyone almost for free since they are simply a small decent housing unit (very easy to build and construct and there are 15 million empty homes in the USA and 20 million empty homes in Europe from Lisbon to Moscow), running water, a small basic free salary to eat, END OF STORY.

The biggest tragedy of our times is that we have lost the moral values on which our society was built.
Lies are the normality and young people believe in them as the new mean to build their life.
Lying, committing crimes are not accountable, not punished.
The bigger the crime the more chances you have to profit and being unpunished.
The second tragedy is that we have no mean whatsoever to rebuild them.
The Media are in the hands of the very people who do not want it, schools are in the hands of the wrong people.
And the third tragedy is that we know and we see and we cannot do anything about it.(or very little)
If the collapse of our society was the beginning of a new Era, well it would be very welcome.

Hey turkle become fabian again and start insulting everyone as usual, that is so cool and so much fun, it is so true also, everything everyone writes is so wrong, useless and stupid, long live tootsie and fabian and the other sock puppets you write to let out your true self finally, to be free with what you really think, let it all out man, you can do it, let it all out, don’t be shy, insult and be as nasty as possible.Spelling error correction:
Hey give us back the troll pissant, he was fun! Please don’t let this site become boring, he made it exciting and entertaining, I had a good lot of laughs from it, come on, don’t be a party pooper…
dickweed…
Other old69’s handles are:
San Jose’ Mommy
Alexandra

Alexandra says:
“Make believe you are the Instant Singularity, you really become it, because the Instant Singularity thrives on falsity and lies and converts itself into truth…”
As if truth and lies mean anything, they are a joke, they are inventions themselves, they are disjoint entities in opposition measuring and reciprocally defining themselves, hence are false, hence don’t exist anyways as there is no absolute reference system only the two items talking to each other, which means, taken as a whole as a single set the two items are just one, talking to itself, which means inventing any crap at all, since there is no control, and such…

Vis a vis your comments on the catholicity of WF Buckley and Tony Blair plus the integrity of the Catholic church itself it needs to be pointed out that the traditional center of gravity in Christianity was more in the east than in the latin west, and that moreover, Eastern Orthodox monks refer to the Pope as “the chief of all the protestants.” So, the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t need to be “infiltrated” in order to be dysfunctional because R.C. clerics have been effectively fucking themselves for centuries.
People forget, or likely never knew in the first place, that the original liturgies were in Greek, not Latin, and that the majority of the bishops attending the Coucil of Nicea in Asia Minor were Greek, not Latin.
The Greeks have traditionally regarded the simpering Jesus of the latin west as ” the bearded lady”. The Latin “Franks” also introduced various innovations which directly lead to the protestant rebellion, hence, the appellation “chief of the protestants”. To be fair there was one Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Churches who had Calvinistic sympathies, but his heresies were not adopted as the standard. And also, the iconoclasts were similarly overcome in time, an event which is still celebrated on Orthodoxy Sunday when the icons were reinstated to the churches of Byzantium.
Similarly, there were no medieval dark ages in Byzantium nor was there any perceived need for a renaissance or an enlightenment. The Latin west is viewed as rationalistic and alienated from true spirituality in the eastern churches.
Tony Blair was a high church Anglican who waited to convert to Catholicism until he was out of office. William F. Buckley considered himself to be an English Catholic which is why he was invited by PBS to be a commentator on the original broadcast of “Brideshead Revisited”. The reason Buckley thought like this, other than having an English name, is that he attended prep-school at the Portsmouth Benedictine Priory in Newport, RI which is run by the English congregation of the Catholic Benedictines and where many of the teaching monks have been Englishmen. English Catholics are more old fashioned and “high church” than American Catholics.

“My gut says it is time to be out of the markets (all of them), to turn paper assets into productive assets (garden tools, fences, compost, solar panels, etc) where possible, and upstock supply levels of necessities. ”
You will probably be forced to leave it all behind.
Don’t fool yourself, just paper cash is your best bet, leave as much cash in your house and bank as possible and don’t buy anything at all. You will probably have to move if things get really bad, you won’t do anything with fences, solar panels, etc. you won’t be able to live where you are probably (only very few can stay in most suburbs, costs too much to get water and electricity and such to such remote and stretched out places). Just be ready to move some place else real fast where things are a little better, there is no escape strategy, no solution, just keep cash and save it.

Yeah buddy, you will go where the WATER is, that will become the most important “product”, nay, the only product that matters, it will be funny to see how everything, virtually everything we have bar none becomes worth a BIG FAT ZERO when you are simply thirsty. When water finishes you can roll over and die, or slug it out with other people and die anyways. How I would love it for 7 billion people on earth to just kill themselves and get out of the way, what a pain in the a*s they all are, why don’t they (and all of you) just roll over and die ?
From:ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=163929
“Those few that still think, being that thinking will be one of the first activities to end, given that its “energy return on energy invested would be hugely negative”, being that people couldn’t manipulate or change anything anymore, so thought would mostly disappear, but those that would think that there was once running water, free water coming out of a faucet would be flabbergasted and amazed. Just having water, drinking some dirty polluted water from the crowded wells, will seem like absolute paradise, and they would think, people really once had water for free ? from faucets ? they will never believe it. It is like a trillion years of technological evolution according to our “fairy tale extrapolation” of science and technology are closer to us than free water will be closer to them. A technological singularity, a virtual reality matrix is closer and more understandable to us, than just having water will be to them. Just to drink will seem like an absolute paradise after the end of free energy comes to be. There will only be a few millions left on earh after more than 6 billion just starved and died. People got sick and died, there would be no doctors or “health care”, another absolute science fiction item that people would never believe existed.
People will sleep in cars, all the old rusting chevys and buicks, those will be their homes since the old wood homes will have all been burnt to keep warm, and they will think “these once moved ?” how on earth is it even conceivable !?!? our beds once moved by that magic piece of iron in the hood and some mysterious black liquid ?!?! That is not even imaginable many will think. Another thing that will disappear is TIME. Time will flow ever more slowly, everything will flow in an increasingly slow motion. Why measure time, when nothing can happen ? nothing can change, all the motors are turned off, there is no more electricity, computers will be mysterious black boxes, people will look at them as some kind of mysterious magic boxes of the past, maybe some alien civilization left them, who knows what they did or how they “worked”. Why, did things actually “work” once ? No all this can’t be true, it must be some god that came down to the earth and describe a science fiction – metaphysical paradise, it must have all been invented by some mind going crazy because it didn’t drink some water after a few days.”

From:ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=176094
Blocks of text never end as if language and thought are a self multiplying machine, symbols that generate other symbols and on forever, a never ending decoding of all, a self constructing entity using people and their minds as mirrored in other minds as reflections of new blocks of text, new constructions, a self generating universe full of symbols…
Now that I said this crap I am OK…Now I am OK… No, I am never OK….

Hey clusterfuckers
Not a bad essay this week, but the significance of the grand theater we saw seems lost on most people. As I have said before there are not 2 political parties in the US, there is only 2 wings of the same party. The rich and those who want to be richer and don’t mind crushing the “little people” to get what they want. See Paul Ryan’s plan as a prime example, that smiling little crocodile can look people right in the face and say ” This cut in social security is good for you, this cut in corporate taxes is good for you.” Obama’s plan isn’t much better. Point is politicians are almost exclusively very affluent and they want to stay that way. Hence the budget cut mania that will be taken out of the hides of all who might really need that social security check that, after all most, have paid into all of their working lives. I have no problem with ending social security, just give me back every dime I have paid in over my working life!
Anyway why is everyone making a fuss over some ghostly computer code being passed off as money these days, that can easily be erased. See Mom no more debt! The fact is the monetary system is no longer connected to real resources, the labor needed to change those resources into finished goods or valuations of goods that match the actual socalled salary base available to purchase those goods. What we are witnessing is a readjustment of the real economy that is dragging the socalled financier( ghostly computer code) based economy back where it should be, to the real world.
Cheer up all, there will be life after the great implosion.
loveday

Actually, there is a very good reason to create make believe causes and effects to explain economic problems and propose solutions: so that you can pass a special agenda, with the excuse of creating “growth” or “jobs” you can pass all kinds of biased politics (almost always going in favor of the already super rich) and all kinds of cuts, firings, you name it, always explaining the reason with imaginary, make believe linearities and causes and effects like “tax cuts will create jobs” and such: the real goal is simply the tax cuts, the creating jobs part is a convenient excuse that oddly no one ever challenges (because they are totally brainwashed ?) or maybe don’t give a crap, or they all like to lie and sustain any crap as long as it has a large enough consensus: if everyone believes in a lie (many lies actually), that lie becomes automatically the truth, or say the same lie over and over again and it becomes the truth and such.
But shame on me for being so naive, everyone knows that everything is fake, false, is a make believe, everyone knows that jobs are no longer necessary and meaningless and tax cuts will just help the rich and so forth and so on, they all just play along for the fun of it, to see how far the lies can go, to see how far they can all get away saying lies of all kinds forever and such, and enjoying and considering anyone that criticizes as naive and babyish, what the heck doesn’t he still get it that it is all a make believe system of contrasting and dominating interests and that everything that is said is just a bunch of BS and crap, just a formality, just to put on a show ?

Historia magistra vitae.
History of Money: The Money Masters 2/2youtube.com/watch?v=HonLv9K2nxo
Even though I saw something similar some time ago, this video, in two parts, but the second so clearly explains the situation…
I ask myself: if everybody knows, why nobody does anything?
Are these banksters so powerful that millions of people cannot do anything against them?

Because we know that another mind is behind an item ? Is that why that item becomes important ? but other minds on the internet are behind anything, are they important ? and why are other minds important anyways ? or is it just one mind reflected in metaphysical mirrors acting as make believe separate minds ? and the judgment of any mind is the judgment you deal to anything ? and what value can that have, being that you know that your judgment is a quirk, a random fluke, not based on anything, just some associations with pain/pleasure and sensations or expectations but irrelevant, the mind as an irrelevant variable ?
My notebook crashed, I installed the Xp all over losing “everything”, wow did it improve, even the antivirus is no longer present but the antivirus “is” the virus in that it slowed down the machine hugely: but more importantly the computer never worked so well now that it is all gone and I have only the bare minimum on it, so this goes to show in a general sense, we store loads of crap that we will never use both physically and mentally, and we believe in loads of imaginary threats (like viruses or sicknesses and global warming) that are irrelevant and just bog down everything, just are a useless weight on everything: free your minds, throw everything away, get rid of everything, don’t believe in all the threats (even because no matter what, something will get you one way or another in the end, life is like playing a game of chess against god, he makes you win but then in the end you will lose no matter what, so don’t avoid any loss you will have anyways, you are doomed to lose, you can just “kick the can (the consequence, you avoided that bad thing with the airbag, but got run over while walking the next day) down the road” but can’t avoid to lose in the end anyways) and scaredy cat threats (entire industries make their living on all kinds of paranoia like airbags, avoiding this sickness and that, and such), get rid of 99 % of thoughts and problems and all kinds of crap in the mind.
The mind brain is excess capacity achieved, it has too many clock cycles to know what to do with itself so it invents its own problems and becomes its own prisoner like computer viruses and anti viruses, or filling up hard disks with all your “precious stuff” (who cares ? it is all a huge pile of trash anyways!!!) saving and keeping “your past” or the past events or memories (filling physical storages (in the USA buildings used to save all your old junk, but we are always all old junk anyways) or hard disks with a huge amount of useless crap like this very block of text) and all such huge pile of crap, and so forth and so on. Kill values, kill anything that seems valuable, kill any sense of values or importance of anything (especially people things) and all, kill it all, it deserves to all die.
Now, am I ok after writing this ? Am I ok ? No, I am never OK….

Yeah, man, I haven’t done all the deep youtube research…I sit at the foot of the master.
————————————
Or at least tell us the minute in that lecture where the guy gives convincing proof that Marx was a vatican spy, or whatever. Unlike our friend Vlad, I have a few things I need to do on a day to day basis and don’t have the time to spend watching every wack jobs u-tube postings.

humping wheelbarrows around ect.
building codes ect.
==================
It’s “etc.” Ned. The t comes between the e and the c, not after. It amazes me (actually it doesn’t as will be explained below) that you have seen and read “etc.” what? at least a million times in your life? yet you have NOT noticed the correct spelling of this 3-letter abbreviation.
BTW, the unabbreviated word is etcetera. Notice the first 3 letters?
I checked my 4-inch thick Random House Dictionary and found that there are 37 entries of words and acronyms that begin with e c t but there are only 4 words (other than etcetera itself, its abbreviation etc. and its Latin form et cetera) that begin with e t c and all are related to the word “etch.” Therefore, there are NO words (other than etcetera itself) that begin with the pronunciation “et set.”
This explains your use of “ect.” You are influenced by the usual and don’t notice the unusual.
A similar thing was happening yesterday when Auntie Soake wrote superfulous rather than superfluous.
Although, at this point, you would like to bash my head in with a sledge hammer I will suffer your disapproval in the expectation of never seeing “ect.” again in your future posts … nor the posts of other commenters reading this, since you are not the only offender.

Turkle,
What makes you think Vlad has any “net worth” at all? My guess is he’s living in a single wide on social security month to month…..you know….the commie retirement program.
As Vlad so eloquently points out, communists are free to be successful; but there’s one thing pretty consistent about our racist friends, they are failures roughly 99.9% of the time. After all, that’s how they got there, casting about for someone to blame for their problems.
Vlad like’s to talk about Id and Superid…..Freudian horseshit, but when it comes to the common sense psychology needed to face his own emotional problems, he throws snake eyes every time. ‘Not me baby, I’m not responsible for being a loser, THEY did it to me.’ Dorian Gray…indeed. Textbook stuff, for which you don’t even need a textbook.
BTW….you’re Irish, yes? What are you seeing over there in terms of the economy and social issues?

“All the stuff we erected to live our lives in – the stupendous armature of highways, strip malls, suburban houses, skyscraper condos, sewer systems, electric grids – is beyond our power to repair now. ”
Mode of usage of the USA: by cars. The only way to use the USA is by cars. It would cost peanuts to get a complete BUS system up and running in the USA, but someone said that it wastes almost as much gasoline as cars anyways because of the weight of the BUS or such. Oh well, there goes down the drain the BUS solution, so as usual there is no solution. Hate me, I hate myself, I am a wimp, a pissed off loser, a weakling, I want to fail because I don’t want the responsability of succeeding and living up to expectations therefore I fail even more than I should, just like a coward, a pussy whip, wimp, anonymous coward – wimp – weakling, I hate myself and you should too (hate me or myself ? or are we the same ?). Love failing, fail real fast and as much as possible this way you can escape any chore, any responsability, any work (or especially hard work) you can run away fast like an anonymous coward just like me and be lazy and then blame it on others, you can do it man, go man go.
Overpopulation myth: I saw maps.google.com and saw street views of London and Mexico City: what total turds of cities, with crappy small homes 90 % of them are made up of (all puny 2 floor buildings, go figure) ! Incredible crap, no high technology applied to living there, if they would build 10 to 15 floor modern elegant apartment buildings like they have in Southern Europe Madrid, Rome or Seoul they can easily host at least 10 times their population: oh I forgot, then how can they justify the high real estate prices in those two turds of cities ? incredible, and then they talk about overpopulation, resource scarcity and other lies (but have a keen eye on their wallets), oh the deceptions never end, the lies, and such. Man is just so turdy, they could host a hundred times their population with buidings like Hong Kong, what crap heads, hate them with all your guts, two turd cities choosing to use low technology, crappy old crap housing just because, becasue they suck.
Hide a thought by another, all of thought is just trying to distract itself from another thought (or from itself), thoughts hiding behind others and so on forever, but if it is hiding from itself ? An infinite recursion of thoughts hiding from itself and other thoughts…
All of life is just fighting other will powers (but especially your own), the eternal fight of others and their free will, they will always contradict you and deceive you, and yet keep on fighting other free wills expecting that the outcome can be different: no way jose’, you will always fight other free wills and lose (unless you have power and can somehow force it).

The only relevant sentence in your screed is the second sentence of number 3 – “the only people who benefit from illegal labor are the unscrupulous people who hire illegal immigrants”.
All your other points are superfluous.
Your are a peon, as are the vast majority of us. Your thoughts, your opinions, your outrage – none of that matters.
People who matter want cheap labor, and that is why they can truck in cheap laborers.
And, as Prog points out, legal immigrants also take jobs that Americans would be willing to do – such as nurses, doctors, engineers and college professors.
You are right, however, in that prisons break up families.
Max Keiser pointed out on his last show that US taxpayers pay $600 billion to lock up our fellow Americans, more, by far, than any other country on this planet. Medicare costs $400 billion.
Don’t you have any problem with this other than prescribing more family breakup for immigrants?

What happened to asoka? Did he get banned also?
Or is he embarrassed about making an easily checked prediction, now proven wrong.
He dissed Michael Hudson’s assertion that this was all Kabuki theater, that Wall Street would never allow a default, and that Social Security and Medicare were the targets of the entire scam.
Here it is, August 3rd, and it turns out that Michael Hudson was dead on right.
Unfortunately for the American people.

Whoa Baby!! This is starting (haha, “starting” he says) to be a nightmare for you, isn’t it Tootsie? Ford dipped to $11.36 this morning.
BTW, it appears you’ve been banned AGAIN. But this is nothing new and I for one look forward to your return under a new name. (Apparently only Old69 and I get a kick out of your endless insults.)
And speaking of names I’ve always marveled how completely different the names are that you’ve chosen … no common thread, no rhyme or reason … well, except when you went through a period of doubling up as in Tsa Tsa, Ling Ling, Dick Dick, Head Head, etc.
Just curious, how do you come up with these new screen names?

Politics sure are funny. The Tea Party is furious because the debt ceiling was raised and the cuts were way too small ($1 trillion). Rush Limbaugh and his right wing nutters are screaming it non-stop on the radio. The Republicans are furious because the Tea Party freaks outmaneuvered them and destroyed their majority leader John Boehner. And the liberal Dems aren’t happy either because the rich weren’t forced to pay their fair share. The Tea Party/GOP also lost out on their secondary goal to impeach Obama if he tried using the 14th Amendment to keep the US from defaulting.
The country did NOT default. Debts will be paid. And the largest debt reduction plan in the history of the country has been passed. Not only that but now women’s birth control will be FREE under everyone’s health care insurance, reducing BOTH the number of abortions and the number of children raised on welfare. The Bush tax breaks are about to sunset and the rich will finally lose their free ride hence increasing needed revenue. The wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq are winding down. Less money spent on over priced supplies, etc. from Halliburton and KBR contracts will definitely reduce the deficit further.
I still don’t get the Tea Party. They keep acting like its 1950. Its not. It’s a new Millennium and there are now 7 billion people on this Earth, all who want to live like Americans. The bigger the human population gets, the more expensive everything becomes because there are less resources to go around. Duh! It seems so obvious that either we have to get better at sharing/conserving resources or a huge amount of the world population has to die. The Tea Party is so self-center (a local one recently wrote that the Path to Prosperity plan only cuts benefits for those younger than 55/like no one will ever get old and need the Social Security that they paid into!). As long as new babies are born into this world, we will need more hospitals, more schools, more roads, more bridges, etc. Don’t want to pay more in taxes? Make sure there’s less people born/more people dying. Easy peasy.

Debts will be paid. And the largest debt reduction plan in the history of the country has been passed.
=================
Although I believe many of the points in your post are true I do NOT believe the above^.
Rather, I believe:
. our debts will never be paid except via massive inflation.
. “the plan” agreed upon yesterday will not reduce the debt but rather, at best, will slow the rate of increase in the debt.

Dale, I posted and then I went away and waited for folks to respond. I will now state how I feel about these points. I agree with all of them. I think of myself as a Liberal with a capital ‘L’ but being progressive doesn’t mean that you should have your head shoved up your posterior and let it remain there.
The fact is that this country and the state of California is truly overloaded with illegal immigrants, most of them Mexican nationals. My daughter is currently waiting for a serious operation but it will be months before she gets it. If you go to any of the emergency rooms in the L.A. area (and I’ve been there about 6 or 7 times this year) you will see scores of poor Mexicans lined up and waiting hours or days for treatment. Who pays for all of this? The taxpayers of California. Who will pay for my daughter’s operation? She got laid off last year and lost her health insurance and daddy sure doesn’t have the money. My daughter has checked and will basically get a loan from the hospital and have to pay them back. However, the loan/operation process will force her to wait months for what she needs. Illegal immigrants will also be getting hospital loans but who thinks that they will actually be paying them back? Chances are that next year, after receiving medical help, they will be working in Van Buren, Arkansas or any other number of hayseed towns and the operation that took place in California will just be a vague memory. Please don’t say that I’m a hypocrite and I feel this way just because of my daughter’s situation. My wife and I have felt this way for years now.
My wife is a teacher who says that at least half of her students are illegal immigrants. My wife is as progressive as I am but she says that all of this is a recipe for a coming social meltdown.

Dear Qball,
Thank you for pointing out my misspelling of the abbreviation ‘etc.’ Ect.? How embarrassing! And to think that I studied latin for two years in high school! I do know that etc. is an abbreviation of the latin phrase ‘et cetera’, meaning ‘and the rest’, but my fingers decided to type this as ect. Probably just another ‘senior moment’ on the long road to senility.

Qshtik, you are absolutely dead right on. There is no way that the United Morons of America will be able to pay off all of these debts. The United States of Amnesia may even be unable to remember they actually owe the money. Hyper-inflation is coming with a vengeance. Peter Schiff sure thinks so and so do a whole bunch of other smart people. Buy gold and silver and run for the hills (I sure am).

Agree with all your points. I’ve had arguments about this issue with so called “progressives” up here and have been called a racist for making points like yours. I crap on such people relentlessly. No patience for them. Bottom line is when they pull out the racist card I invite them to pack up and leave the country and go live somewhere else because they are, to my olfactory apparatus at least, stinkin’ up the joint.
Nothing wrong with legal, controlled immigration. If you want to survive as a country you have to control your borders. So when dickbrain progressives ask me with their superb sneers how my parents got here, I reply to them “legally, you shit ferfuckinbrains, with a passport”.

Wagelaborer, I think that legal immigration should be curtailed as well. There is absolutely no need anymore to be importing human beings into this country.
The thing about breaking up families by sending family members off to prison is a bit too much. In almost all instances, people who violate immigration laws don’t get locked up for years in American prisons. People who violate American laws should simply be removed from our country. If illegal mommy and daddy have children born in this country and now U.S. citizens, then they can go home with mommy and daddy and come back into this country when they become adults. And don’t tell me that they get to come back in when they become 5 years old with mommy and daddy in tow as their “caretakers.”

“Hyper-inflation is coming with a vengeance.”
Uhm, no, the exact opposite is happening: hyper deflation as in prices going down and lower and lower since it is becoming harder and harder to sell things and didn’t you notice that housing prices have been going down in the last 3 years and will keep on going down ? And anywho’s this hyperinflation threat and scare has been going on for a few years now, but the exact opposite has been happening. only those turds in health kare and the colleges keep on hiking up the prices of their “services” but they should be beaten all up to death and hated with all your guts, those slobs thieves, hate them and kill them.

Dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth. It makes life easier to bear. It lets them turn away from the hard choices ahead to bask in a comforting certitude that God or science or the market will be their salvation. This is why these apologists for globalism continue to find a following. And their systems of propaganda have built a vast, global Potemkin village to entertain us. The tens of millions of impoverished Americans, whose lives and struggles rarely make it onto television, are invisible. So are most of the world’s billions of poor, crowded into fetid slums. We do not see those who die from drinking contaminated water or being unable to afford medical care. We do not see those being foreclosed from their homes. We do not see the children who go to bed hungry. We busy ourselves with the absurd.
The game is over. We lost. The corporate state will continue its inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation and the planet is locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most of us will struggle to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These elites do not have a vision. They know only one word: more.adbusters.org/magazine/96/chris-hedges-revolution-in-america.html

Way to go Mr Williams. You’re singing all my songs. Legal immigration needs to have some rational underpinnings. Like when you have massive unemployment and cannot employ the folks you already have why on earth would you import more? To create more unemployment? To depress already depressed wages? To create social strife? Lowering wages may be on the “business” agenda but to my mind that is the agenda of jackasses. Social strife doesn’t benefit anyone, the business community included.

I think you’re half right. Home prices have come down a lot and will come down a lot more. Stocks are going to crater too. Your argument is the same as that once held by Bill Bonner of Agora Financial and the Daily Reckoning. But, Bill now argues that there will be a double whammy; stocks and homes will fall in value and commodities will skyrocket to the moon. How depressing would that be? Your home value is halved and it now costs you $15 to buy a burger at McDonalds.
Even with hyper-inflation, home values won’t be able to move upward because the American public is basically broke. But, they may be forced to pay more for a loaf of bread because one of the things that all humans have to do is eat.

and I posted before I read CASHS’ comments.
believe it or not.
I am sick of all of these illegals. I live among them. The whole thing is upsetting for many reason, and Dolan laid it out very well.
Thank You

Um, I think you missed my point.
I was referring to the fact that over 2,000,000 Americans are locked up in prisons.
That we pay $600 billion a year to keep them in cages.
That prison rape is treated as comic material, and prisoner abuse is ignored.
That the strain on families is immense, and is matched by the strain on communities.
I wasn’t referring to illegal immigrants, although it should be a scandal that, instead of deporting them, more and more are being locked up in private, for-profit prisons.
Prisons are now a money-making scam, and that SHOULD scare everyone, not just those of us who believe in freedom and justice.

I guess you missed the part about my “largely agreeing with you” regarding excessive levels of immigration, since you took the opportunity to repeat the same arguments again.
Too bad about your daughter, that’s tough. Too bad we don’t have a rational; healthcare, immigration, military expenditure, taxation, social service, retirement, preventive care, etc. etc.; system in this country.
I guess you didn’t notice all the poor whites standing in line at the ER along with your daughter, they are also part of the system overload, you just noticed the little brown people.
So, if you’re looking for someone to put a stamp of approval on what sounds very much like veiled racist attitudes, I’m not going to help you out.
There are plenty of websites that will go out of their way to kiss your ass, if that’s what you want. Ask Vlad, I’m sure he has a list of them.

I remember when a loaf of 9 grain whole wheat, baked at the health food store, fresh ‘homemade’ was 55 cents.
now same loaf is 5$.
So I started buying whole wheat tortillas
and I think alot of other folks did also.
Cuz the price doubled really quick.
Still half the price of bread.
I can bake my own bread so that’s good.
Oh don’t care how much Mac D’s is, don’t eat there.
I wonder if someday that’s all there will be to eat, now that is a scary thought.

So true.
I read some about prison systems.
Listen if you want some good reading and from the guy who knows, read or google ANDREW VACHSS.
He has a website. well 2 I think.
He is all about what you are speaking of about prisons. The real deal. He is a lawyer in New York, and started out as a social worker. He is about 70 now. he knows alot.
He also writes novels.
That’s how I discovered him.
THE GETAWAY MAN. one of my faves and one of his earliest. You might enjoy if you are a reader.
I think they should NOT mix the violent with the non violent offenders for starters.
I have alot more to say on this subject, but have an appt.
🙂

As I said in my post, I have been forced to go to our local emergency rooms several times this year and yes, there are some white folks in there who look like they might be financially challenged (like me). I don’t know where you live but if you lived where I live you would walk in and right away notice that the majority of the people waiting there are Hispanic (or little brown people as you preferred to call them). That is just a fact.
And about the racist comments. Do you sit down to eat with the following types of people at your Sunday dinners: Mexicans, Indians (not Native American), African-Americans, Filipinos? I do because guess what, they are all members of my family. Do you have a 4 year old nephew who is as black as Buckwheat from ‘Our Gang’? My guess is that the answer is a big resounding ‘N000000’. Do you have a niece that speaks Tagalog? Guess what, I do. Was your father one of the only farmers in the state of Mississippi to invite black workers to sit down and eat with us in the early 50’s? Probably not. I doubt if you’ve ever set foot in Mississippi.
It’s easy for you to sit in your comfortable chair at home or work, put your white fingers on a keyboard and blog that somebody is a racist. Try saying that to a bunch of goobers in a Southern state who think you are a traitor to the White Race. Don’t try to kiss their ass though unless you want something shoved up yours.

I recommend this article to Wage, Asoka and other avowed socialists:nytimes.com/2011/08/03/world/americas/03cuba.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=cubans%20set&st=cse
Over the long haul it is simply impossible for societies to resist the tug of Capitalism (aka, human nature).
Here is an excerpt:“There’s going to be huge demand,” said José, 36, who declined to give his last name, stepping away from the crowd and keeping an eye out for eavesdroppers. “It’s been prohibited for so long.”Private property is the nucleus of capitalism, of course, so the plan to legitimize it here in a country of slogans like “socialism or death” strikes many Cubans as jaw-dropping.

We all know that our prison systems are run like our corrupt vampire-like corporations. As a matter of fact, I think they are corporations in a sense. However, I always remember the Chris Rock statement that “If you don’t want to get arrested by the police and go to jail, then OBEY THE LAW.”
There may be some people who think that prison rape is funny but there have always been and will always be a bunch of sick miscreants. And, there definitely is a need to reform our prison systems. But, people should try to stay out of trouble and not end up being in a position where they need that type of reform to take place. I have never been locked up for anything – ever and that is not just a matter of luck. Chris Rock is right.

There’s a difference. You framed the situation in terms of ‘people’, immigrants, people of color, the ‘others’. I frame the situation in terms of ‘issues’; immigration, values, funding, priorities.
I don’t know who is sitting at your dinning room table, but if they’re who you say they are, maybe you aren’t comfortable speaking your mind there, and that’s why you’re unloading here.
That’s how it works isn’t it? A lot of people aren’t as nakedly honest as Vlad, and don’t want to be considered a racist, but if you cut to the heart of it….there it is. I’m not saying that’s necessarily “you”, if you reread my original post I was trying to qualify your statements, and you are providing some clarity, but there are also a lot of cross currents running through what you say.
Like a lot of working class people, who have had their grasp on prosperity weakened, you sound like you want to blame all your loss on fellow members of the working class. You want to get mad at somebody…..FOLLOW THE MONEY! Who benefits from weak borders? who benefits from excessive immigration? who benefits from poor healthcare systems? The oligarchs are counting on being able to divide us, because if we ever get united, they’re fucked. There is nothing preventing us from having properity for anyone willing to work, except a handful of greedy people who think they deserve it all, and that isn’t the guy standing next to your daughter in the ER.

Hey DW,I was locked up once overnight. Back in the day, probably 1979. It was in Rhode Island. My friends and I were sleeping in the woods in my tricked out van outside of Westerly, RI by Misquamicut beach, a beautiful beach just past the tip of Long Island with beautiful sand and nice surf. My crime was sleeping in a no sleeping zone. We were locked up in the local jail overnight with about 100 other sleepers. I guess where we were is tossed every night by the local fuzz. $100 fine each and a huge money maker for the town. Crime pays, but mostly it pays for the state!

Social Security and Medicare were the targets of the entire scam.
Wage, wait till you see what happens to the program-cutting panel of 6 and all the lobbyists with their payola to get their agendas taken care of… Ah yes, the best government money can buy.
But don’t call this capitalism–it’s beyond.
Wage, one more thing, My cat threw a blood clot and is now unable to walk. We are waiting to pick him up from the animal hospital if they let us.
What a shock that was. Last night he looked like he was sleeping, but he couldn’t get up on his own and this morning it was even worse.

Oh I am so sorry about your Cat, I hope he is okay to be home again and can walk again.
I often wondered if animals do that like humans, now I know they do.
Poor baby. You must be sad.
LOL
There is a very touching poem, about when a pet cat passes on…..in case yours does.
THE FELINE SPIRIT
just google it. it’s different than the rainbow bridge. it helped me when my cat got cancer and I had to let him go.

Wow, it has been like 20 posts here without the use of the word “fucktard.” I don’t think I even saw a “moron” go by. What a nice change of pace.
No, dale, I’m not from Ireland. Whatever gave you that idea? From what I hear, the economy there is not good (housing crash, etc.) and people are pretty morose right now, in their typical Irishness. There’s a lot of vacant houses, and unemployment is high. But I have no firsthand knowledge.
I have no real way of knowing about Vlad’s life situation. I was supposing that he is of, shall we say, modest means. My main point was that you are not a good example of a Marxist Liberal bugaboo.
What is with these clowns painting red anyone who has the slightest criticism of their online pronouncements? Is this some kind of cultural meme that heretofore no one has clued me in upon?
When in doubt, call your opponent a Commie.
I think if you do this, you automatically lose the argument, under the same idea as Godwin’s Law, unless the person really is a bonafide Communist infiltrator.

Heh Ripped, you just got “rolled” on by the local cops. I should clarify something I said so I don’t sound like a “goody two shoes.” Actually, there was some luck in not getting nabbed at some times in my life. My mom and dad always taught me to obey the law but young males always do some stupid things in their early years even if the transgressions aren’t serious. I was just trying to make the point that if people end up locked behind prison bars, they are not generally “victims” of the system. They probably did something really dumb and probably something downright mean, degenerate and harmful. Disobeying some asinine (and unknown) law like you did is generally grounds for a fine. They know that you are no danger to the community. They just want to hold you upside down, shake you and see what money falls out. LOL

Those with a cold wit and a way with words are reaching the same conclusions. Phil Rockstroh brings another 2×4 to the left side of the head (3 1/2″ surface making contact).
Rockin’ ’em back on their heels:
“One progenitor of the defiant idiocy of the general population of the U.S. can be traced to the tendency of the consumer state to induce impulsivity rather than reflection i.e., rendering individuals self-involved, infantilized monsters of the id… dazzled by and perpetually reaching for the next bright and shiny.” -P.R.
That ain’t nothin’ in the context of the brilliance of the piece in its’ entirety.
As with Kunstler, it is not the offerings of solutions that are the “point”; it’s the gazing at [and pondering of] the problems and predicaments with as few pre-loaded, propagandized “filters” as possible.
I’ve been hard into the guardrails in the breakdown lane, so other than being cranky time and again, I’m usually a pretty calm person. (The crankiness comes from the reptilian side of me; the calm from the rational and thoroughly mortal side.) This is another thing the power-brokers don’t get a’tall. Some people can’t be panicked into doing/buying/voting for things that counter their own (or their neighbors) interests. That is a very dangerous miscalculation that won’t be realized until the bell tolls.
Sorry for the ramble; here’s the link:informationclearinghouse.info/article28740.htm
(Now I have to check back upthread for that Chris hedges link. Thanks to either LBendet or Wage; gots me a brain resembling cheese of the Swiss variety!! ;o)

[I suspect that in the wake of resource-constraint, Peak Oil-driven economic collapse that the racial harmony facade of Globalism will collapse quickly]
Aaah….Hot, humid, tepid August in Hong Kong….
That time of year when, despite showering twice a day, copious use of powerful Thai body powder and white-people deodorant, some Chinese people still complain about my pungeant “foreign” smell, to which my reply is: “If you think that I smell ‘juicy’, then “EAT ME!”

———— “cold wit and WARM way with words”—-
(That was the original construct that I forgot while typing; I would never imply that JHK was emotionally arctic. I certainly don’t ever get that impression. Sorry.)

Well I was certainly thrown out, along with my fellow teenager friends. Good money for the local constabulory, bad luck for us. Lesson learned, Don’t sleep on public property. I was under the assumption that the country belonged to all of us. guess not, it is a local money-maker!

Dale, do you honestly think that the long term quality of life in this country is best served by bringing in more poor people of any color? I understand blaming the elite, they are more guilty than the illegals. If you replace them, another one will take their place. All societies are run by elites wether we like it or not. Overpopulation and Balkanization are as big a threat to a safe and healthy society as peak oil and peak debt.

The immigration problem isn’t that it leads to multi-culturism, the issue is overpopulation. We don’t have the physical and financial resources to handle 310+ million prople.
When I was in the second grade in school, I believe the population was 140 million, and I didn’t feel that hardly any people were around.
Also, remember that in previous waves of immigration, there were no institutional government programs like social security, welfare, medicaid and food stamps. Individuals and families understood they had to fend for themselves. There was no sense of entitlement from the get-go as there is now. It’s the entitlements that hinder assimilation. Immigrants don’t have to participate in American culture to survive.

This leads to Balkanization, a cultural impasse. That is exactly what we had in the years leading up to the Civil War. The impasse was allowed to drag on until it blew up in their face. The entitlements, the lack of border security, the globalist wanting cheap labor, the democrats wanting new voters,and the immigrants looking for a better life are all part of the complex problem. Border security is the easiest part of the problem to deal with, but none are insurmountable. I left out the illogical worship of diversity especially by those who don’t have to deal with it on a daily basis. That is probably the hardest aspect overcome. An earlier poster said if you have someone that disagrees with you , yell commie if you can’t think of anything else to say. The same could be said of someone yelling racist.

When I was a kid, I think you did not see the crazy crowds you see today. The roads and recreation areas were much more pleasant than they are today. I lived in a rural area only ten minutes from a city of a 100k, but it seemed like it was a thousand miles away. Overpopulation is as much my pet peeve as immigration.

In light of this week’s raising of the debt ceiling and austerity deal, which will hit black Americans particularly hard, I wonder what Obama thinks of the 1970s flick “Blacula”?en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacula

Thanks for the link.
Very well written and explained.
Very often you read: we are at this point because the average American is stupid, always chooses the wrong person, doesn’t know whom to vote etc.
I do not agree.
The average American IS intelligent and knows what America needs.
It was exactly what Obama promised.
Had he done what he was voted for, America would be in a much better shape.
It is not the fault of the people: who do they vote for?
How can you judge a person you do not know if not by what he says he will do?
Obama is like one of those pills that promise you will lose 40 pounds in one week, just “burning fat”.
If you want to lose weight, doesn’t it look the product to chose?
May be the sin of the average American is the obstinacy to believe in its country, the obstinacy to believe that the people who counts are not criminals, not psychopaths.
It takes time to realize that what you used to believe in IS not what you believed it was.

From:ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=176094
But since Man is just an arbitrary configuration, what is really found is simply the laws of interaction of this pure fluke and arbitrary machine of Man with all of its quirky and flukey logic and language, and organization of information in its “mind” and all the pain/pleasure circuits and all of the sensations, etc. with a chunk of matter configured according to what patterns his mind is searching for. In a sense, another circularity, in a sense, another item that is studying itself, or a subset or superset of itself, according to how the distinction between self and outside of self is performed, according to how the delimitation, the boundary of in and out, self and not self is defined and set up, according to how it is imagined in the mind from the outset. So a chunk of electrons and protons is “studying” another chunk of electrons and protons, but both chunks are simply an arbitrary configuration and organization of the elementary particles, are simply a fluke, we don’t study science, we study how this one time quirk fluke of organization and configuration of matter interacts with itself, so even in this case THERE IS NO REAL SCIENCE OPERATING.
As in item Z is studying item (Z,Z,Z,Z). So exactly who or what is studying who or what ? Or is it really (Z,Z,Z,Z) that is studying Z ? Or is it simply a set of items Z that are interacting with themselves, and since they are “playing with themselves” or “talking to itself”, they are actually inventing their own laws, their own reality, they are inventing and discovering their own laws all by themselves making believe that they are outside of themselves, that they are “objective”. Matter interacts with itself and invents itself, Matter plays with itself and creates its own “Laws of Physics”, go figure.
“So a chunk of electrons and protons is “studying” another chunk of electrons and protons, ” So if you decide to put this boundary within a mind – brain (after all science allows you use any experimental apparatus and imagine any experiment you want and do any experiment only according to the model of reality you are trying to imagine, only according to an intentionality of use, a prior idea, theory, equation, model you name it that the experiment is supposed to confirm or negate and such), if the experimental apparatus and the interaction is in only one mind, any mind, a modified mind, or simply any mind making believe, lying to itself, pretending to be a new Instant Singularity mind (after all, truth and false is always just assigned by the same old mind anyways according to what it wants, another circularity, or according to pain/pleasure circuits, another random invented quirk of nature not representing any absolute reference system of measurements since it is not a system outside of itself such that it can justify the very idea that it is objective and confirming the metaphysical validity of the “studying” that is is performing), then anything that mind thinks, or anything that mind says to itself is just as real as any of our traditional science: in the end it is only matter interacting with itself, only matter that is talking to itself, only matter and Mass Energy that is performing a reciprocal information relationship, all within itself, a reciprocal information interaction, all inside itself, so as it is just talking to itself it is justified in making up anything and inventing anything at all, hence the very definition of science is defeated by science itself, it self annhilates itself, it vanishes all by itself, but in the process creates a new universe with wildly different laws of physics, completely overrides all of our laws of physics, and creates a completely new real science!
“So a chunk of electrons and protons is “studying” another chunk of electrons and protons, ” just change the boundary of outside and inside, just change where the observing entity is placed and the observed entity is placed, just change the set and make it all self contained (there is no law against this as it is only a monolithic chunk of Mass – Energy or Matter interacting and talking to itself and you can create any science and any universe and any laws of physics you want). Just put the entire thing ( observer + experimental apparatus ) inside your own brain, talk to yourself, invent anything and you have achieved anything you want, you win, you have won.

So in traditional science you see O A, with O the observer, B the boundary (distinction between inside and outside, self and not self) and A the experimental apparatus. Then change it by putting O and A inside your mind, getting rid of B, change it by making O and A simply thoughts and thought patterns, ideas talking to themselves, talk to yourself, create a sequence of symbols representing the experiment, in short, LIE TO YOURSELF PROUDLY, LIE TO YOURSELF BOLDLY fool the laws of physics by lying to yourself boldly, show the laws of physics that true and false, and the very laws themselves are fake, arbitrary, a make believe invention anyways. After all, the entire set of O and A (even if contained in one mind) is simply a chunk of Matter, of Mass Energy, simply a set of protons and electrons interacting and talking to themselves anyways (just like if O is a scientist and A is a particle accelerator, O and A are separated by space and machines, who cares, the set of (O A) is simply always a set of (O A), simply an aggregated chunk of electrons and protons talking to themselves no matter how elaborate and complex, no matter how many computers are in between them, no matter how much space and buildings and all the (O A) is defined and set up as).
It doesn’t matter how the boundaries of in and out are set up or defined, it doesn’t matter what delimitations are considered part of what, if they are seen as a distinct entity or separate entities, you can invent all kinds of delimitations and part and part of, or imaginary sub delimitations as much as you want, but they are all imaginary lines applied to one monolithic chunk if Mass – Energy or Matter talking to itself.
On another note “doing nothing” is impossible because even if you try to do nothing, the fact that Matter can’t ever reach absolute zero temperature implies that matter will do something always anyways, it will do something for you anyways (aside from the chemical reactions of the cells and the heart and such), so everything is always in a flux of change, change is always happening whether you want it or not, but define change as anything compared to anything else, any event is a change (forward ? backwards ? towards a goal, denying a goal, part of the problem ? part of the solution ? as in a collective effort of elements building up, or taking away ? and what is defining the result, the building or the subtraction ? delimitations in time ? how long in time, a sequence of events that add up ? or is it imaginary ? or are they fighting each other and such). But thought and language (and interactions and Reciprocal Information Relationships Defining Themselves by Measuring Themselves Reciprocally) is always doing something, the next word is the target or is it the next sentence or block of text, or the previous that add up to this one or any other, or a sequence of symbols but are the symbols fighting each other or helping each other, so you have to create a start point -> inhibition(resistance – opposition) -> end point, but what set is following the path and process (another block diagram of a new modified mind ?) and such.

From:ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=166773
“Any modified simulated reality system is much closer to “reality”, is much more real, is much less detached from reality than our natural state as humans. In fact humans are just a combination of matter, a configuration that is the result of 5 billion years of trillions of random chemical experiments playing out on an entire planet. A simulating machine is the result of a few thousand years of technological evolution but nowhere near the scale of natural evolution, nowhere near the complexity and randomness of all the quirk events that brought to the human condition, hence a simulating machine is closer to reality than any “natural” system, is less of a lie and an invention than natural systems.
Simulating machines, new minds either in silicon or brains is actually a trip back towards reality, is actually the discovery of reality and physics and not the other way around, the real simulation is the human mind as nature furnished it. Natural systems are much more detached from reality than any man made simple simulating machine, hence the simulation is closer to reality.
We are a quirk item that is the total result of 5 billion years of evolution of trillions of molecules on an entire planet. How much further from reality can you possibly get ? How much further from the basic apparent laws of physics can you possibly get ?
On an edge, the surface of the earth being an edge between solid and gas, within a very small range of temperatures and conditions, a human needing so many supplemental systems to exist, like food, water, pressure, the right gravity etc. This is so quirky and so improbable that it is not even a lie! a lie, a total outright lie is more true than nature!

This shows that artificial intelligence is not only wrong, it is not even wrong since it is so far away from a human brain. Not even wrong, not even related.
The system of a mind interacting with reality is equivalent to a system of a delimited piece of matter interacting with another delimited piece of matter. The interaction being a set of events, a number of events and the observing entity being an aggregation within a delimited piece of matter. Now the organization and aggregations and sets of matter and events, the system as a whole can be any of untold number of combinations, the events and sensations, the observing entity can experience any of untold number of experiences. So no combination is any truer than any other, they are all lies, or all false or all true. They all have the same amount of detachment from reality or we can assign a parameter to define how detached according to how complex the delimited matter and interacting matter and set of events are. Humans are a planet large set having 5 billion years of events, hence very detached, very arbitrary, very much a lie compared to a simulated neural network in the ball of meat that is a modified brain.
What reality ? What truth ? What physics ? What is composed of what ultimately ? ALL LIES…

If you are going to sharpen saws, you need some tools:
Files
Saw set
Bench vise
Best get them now…..
INDY
If you are going to understand what is happening to the world economy and that of the USA in particular you need to understand the role of credit.
Go to Steve Keen’s Debtwatch for info on this
Go to Gregor.us for further clarification of how this interacts with peak resources.
The problem with conversion to renewable energy, is peak copper, peak rare earths. It is doubtful there is enough copper for the world, and possibly the US to make the conversion with out extensive cannibalization.
INDY

Correction B (the boundary which may include space, machines, wires, you name it) should be between O and A as O B A:
So in traditional science you see O B A, with O the observer, B the boundary (distinction between inside and outside, self and not self) and A the experimental apparatus. Then change it by putting O and A inside your mind, getting rid of B, change it by making O and A simply thoughts and thought patterns, ideas talking to themselves, talk to yourself, create a sequence of symbols representing the experiment, in short, LIE TO YOURSELF PROUDLY, LIE TO YOURSELF BOLDLY fool the laws of physics by lying to yourself boldly, show the laws of physics who you are, namely the set of “laws of physics” trying to escape itself, show the laws of physics that true and false, and the very laws themselves are fake, arbitrary, a make believe invention anyways.
In short, delude yourself, don’t be shy, just do it man, do it, you can do it. Trick yourself and everyone and everything, deceive them all, make them believe all kinds of crap, who cares, the very laws of physics are simply turds.

The biggest tragedy of our times is that we have lost the moral values on which our society was built.
==
What if this society never had moral values to begin with? What if the only thing it ever had was the projection and illusionary propaganda of moral values to mask a Machiavellian reality of theft and power? And now more and more people are seeing through the facade and the lies.
The ancient solution was to disengage and refuse to participate. This is what happened in ancient cna’an. They abandoned the City States and just walked away. This is what gave birth to the ancient nation of Israel.
Moral character is more important than laws. Exactly opposite of Greek/Roman model, and why among many other things the Babylonian/Greek/Roman model always fails.

Thanks J2B,
The Feline Spirit was was sweet. And I appreciate your sentiments. I admit I too was confused by the LOL, but knowing everything I know about you, I knew it had to mean something else. We visited Jambalaya (Jumby) last night but decided he’d be better off getting one more dose of Heparin to help bust this clot and hopefully he’ll be able to walk again. We’ll know in the next couple of days.
__________________________
Patrizia,
I agree with you. When people don’t understand what kind of system they live under they can’t make good choices which is why I blame the corporate owned media who have other businesses that gain from the corporate communism.
It’s not going to break down after one election. This system is codified in every function of the country now and our universities are just as steeped in this as every other aspect.
The electorate are given stinker choices of who they can vote for and these people don’t know how to pressure the elite to create jobs here even if they have $billions on the side. They instead keep cutting jobs to give themselves big bonuses and hire slave labor outside the country. There is no incentive that you can give them to act otherwise since this works too well for them and the government is completely in their thrall.
Campaign finance, a limit to lobbyist influence would be a good start, but with the Supreme court we have, it’s in the bag, so the people will keep electing those who will bring them down.
Imagine the common guy voting for someone who thinks it’s ok to take from the most needy to allow the rich to make more and more. If you watch Chris Matthews you’ll hear how a good swath of the country will be voting for the Republican next time. Imagine Rick Perry the secessionist from Texas getting in. Oh and just look at the cuts these people want to make. Medical research etc.
So how do you dismantle a super power. Just follow the money as they say.

@ Wagelaborer, enjoyed very much the Chris Hedges link you posted, listened last night, though his ‘vocal’ delivery took a wee while to adjust too… Gated high security villages for the uber-rich will be a given, but hey, once you’ve found their main housing units power supply, and compound water delivery point, its easy to get them to squirm…
If that be your bag?
@ Lbendet re: yer four-legged furry whiskered pal, pets can be very special types of friend… though feline aloofness has always intrigued me say, as opposed to the more masculine like dog trait of easy wag-a-tail by ones side obedience. So I hope that this current animal woes blip resolves itself okay for you all. Yer geopolitics links are oft terrific, so keep it up, when yer back on yer game here and focused.
@ Old69/Nameta9
Alexandra says:
I’ve come to accept on here (CFN), that like a visual form of tinnitus your overly verbose and BADLY written warblings are a sort of typographic eczema, patchy type blocks of pure boll#cks… cluttering up the kool space.
Talking of which, do us all a favour and get yerself clinically castrated soonest. Mate, the very thought of your senile seed pushing your pathetically flaccid gene code any further forward into that steely-brite sky-rise future you so oft drone on about, is a truly frightening and depressing prospect!!
And BTW, what I’d never state in some lame throw-away paragraph is any star-trek hippy based sci-fi psychobable, and I dare say that my true fans on here would never fall for that one…
Be seeing you…

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Too Much Magic

Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation

The nationally best-selling author of "The Long Emergency" expands on his alarming argument that our oil-addicted, technology-dependent society is on the brink of collapse—that the long emergency has already begun. Published by the Atlantic Monthly Press.